Sentences Quotes - Page 3

• Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

  Peter Farb

  Mistake, School, Speech

  Peter Farb (2015). “Word Play: What Happens When People Talk”, p.258, Vintage

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• Today, in the newspapers and magazines, the first sentence is, my restaurant is expensive.

  Masa Takayama

  Magazines, Today, Firsts

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• It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.

  Joey Santiago

  Nice, Exclamation Marks, Ends

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• Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body.

  Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

  Children, Powerful, Home

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• The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white.

  Alfred Tarski

  Ifs And, White, Snow

  Alfred Tarski (1986). “Alfred Tarski, Collected Papers: 1935-1944”, Birkhauser

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• In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

  Marianne Moore

  Fabric, Excitement, Gravity

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• I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved... I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p. 182, 1982.

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• Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Independent, Conversation, Circumstances

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• Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

  Edgar Degas

  Real, Communication, Half

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• I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

  Neil Gaiman

  Reading, Writing, Artist

  Neil Gaiman (2016). “The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction”, p.28, HarperCollins

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• If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

  Salman Rushdie

  India, Phrases, Speech

  "Salman Rushdie". Salon Interview, www.salon.com. January 28, 1996.

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• After 15 years of work I have achieved, as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower, the unity of the German nation, and have freed it from the death sentence of Versailles.

  Adolf Hitler

  Years, Soldier, Unity

  Proclamation, 21 Dec. 1941

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• A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate, and impress the mind.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Art, Mind, Moments

  Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmond Malone (1809). “The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds”, p.86

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• Politics is a life sentence. It's an obsessive, all-demanding, utterly fascinating, totally committing profession - stimulating, satisfying, stretching.

  Michael Heseltine

  Politics, Stretching, Obsessive

  "Noble obliges". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. March 10, 2006.

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• All the elements in an advertisement are primarily designed to do one thing and one thing only: get you to read the first sentence of the copy.

  Joseph Sugarman

  Firsts, Elements, Copies

  Joseph Sugarman (2012). “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters”, p.38, John Wiley & Sons

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• My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs because, full disclosure: I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then I'm energized but not so awake that the critical voice clicks on, the voice that sometimes says, "Don't write that," or "Man, that sentence is terrible - you should give up and go pet the cats."

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Giving Up, Coffee, Writing

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• I'm just very, very slow. I would not make it as a journalist, I've got to tell you. I sweat bullets over every sentence, and sometimes, you know, a day will pass and I've written one paragraph, and I've been at the computer for four hours.

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Sweat, Four, Bullets

  Source: content.time.com

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• Letters are meaningless unless put together correctly. Words are worthless unless backed by truth. Sentences are handed out and judged accordingly, but only genuinely honest men or women can create writings that change the world forever.

  Paul Morabito

  Writing, Men, Forever

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• Synonyms know each other like old colleagues, like a set of friends who've seen the world together. They swap stories, reminisce about their origins and forget that though they are similar, they are entirely different, and though they share a certain set of attributes, one can never be the other. Because a quiet night is not the same as a silent one, a firm man is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one because the way they wedge themselves into a sentence changes everything.

  Tahereh Mafi

  Night, Men, Light

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• I go through the text making sure I haven't used any big words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in, I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. After that, I check that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same.

  Martin Millar

  Confused, Nice, School

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• Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

  Jacques Barzun

  Art, Pain, Taken

  "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" by Jacques Barzun in "The Kenyon Review", Volume 5, No. 3 (pp. 321-345), Part II, www.jstor.org. Summer 1943.

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• We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Real, Character, Men

  Maria Edgeworth “Castle Rackrent”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Punishment, Murder, Crime

  "The Idiot". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868 - 1869.

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• Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

  Doris Lessing

  Dialect, Development, Association

  Doris Lessing (1979). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 : Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days”

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• I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His Day is marching on.

  Julia Ward Howe

  Marching On, Dew, Lamps

  Julia Ward Howe (1866). “Later Lyrics”, p.41

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