Sentences Quotes - Page 7

• Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

  Fay Weldon

  Circles, Forever, Sound

  Fay Weldon (1984). “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil”, Pantheon

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• [On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.

  Mary McGrory

  Running, Morning, Men

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• The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

  Susan Sontag

  Poet, Units, Prose

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.566, Macmillan

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• Tis mighty easy o'er a glass of wine
  On vain refinements vainly to refine,
  To laugh at poverty in plenty's reign,
  To boast of apathy when out of pain,
  And in each sentence, worthy of the schools,
  Varnish'd with sophistry, to deal out rules
  Most fit for practice, but for one poor fault
  That into practice they can ne'er be brought.

  Charles Churchill

  Pain, Wine, School

  Charles Churchill (1855). “The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill: With Memoir, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes”, p.377

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• The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

  Mary McCarthy

  Together, Adjectives, Phrases

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

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• My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Mind, Inability, Nuisance

  Source: www.slate.com

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• I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Normal, Energetic

  Interview with Andy Ward, www.slate.com. January 7, 2013.

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• I've always been a fast reader. Now I had to do it slowly, discussing each sentence. And every time I wanted to change something I had to come up with an intelligent defense I could be pretty sure that they would turn my suggestion down, as they had so many aspects to keep in mind. However, if I argued well, I could have a chance. I had to think of every comma, every word.

  Karl Ove Knausgard

  Intelligent, Thinking, Mind

  "'Something that's not yourself.' — An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgård". Interview with Rebecka Bülow, logger.believermag.com. September 18, 2013.

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• Some is, I think, the personal in any act of writing. You find yourself caught up: you start a sentence, and it becomes revelatory, not just of the character, but of you as well.

  David Bezmozgis

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. September 23, 2014.

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• All your trouble comes from lack of exercise. A man of your strength and constitution ought always to have kept physically active. So don't jibe at the very wise advice that sentences you to one hour's walk a day. You imagine the work of the mind takes place only in the brain; but you're much mistaken. It takes place in the legs as well.

  George Sand

  Wise, Exercise, Men

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• The Light of the world is not put out. Now have death and the grave been converted into the great testimonies for life and immortality. Now may each man, who has the sentence of Adam upon him, know that he is a kinsman of the Son of God. Now may he follow Him; and so, when the darkness is thickest around him and within, not walk in it, but see the Light of Life.

  Frederick Denison Maurice

  Son, Men, Light

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• Buonaparte is certainly writing, or rather dictating, his memoirs. He walks backwards and forwards with his hands behind him, and dictates so fast that two or three of his suite are obliged to be in attendance, that the one may take down one-half of a sentence, and another the rest; they then literally compare notes, and put the disjointed legs and wings and heads of periods together. This is writing a book as he fought a battle.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Book, Writing, Wings

  Mary Russell Mitford (1870). “The Life of Mary Russell Mitford ; Related in an Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends. Ed. by A.G. Estrange”, p.7

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• I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Punctuation Marks, Vision, Pavement

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• As I do not live in an age when rustling black skirts billow about me, and I do not carry an ebony stick to strike the floor in sharp rebuke, as this is denied me, I rap out a sentence in my note book and feel better. If a grandmother wants to put her foot down, the only safe place to do it these days is in a note book.

  Florida Scott-Maxwell

  Book, Rap, Grandmother

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• I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory.

  Elizabeth I

  Memories, Reading, Pruning

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• The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

  Storm Jameson

  Writing, Reality, Skeletons

  Storm Jameson (1933). “No time like the present”

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• almost all American writers tend to overwrite, to tell too much. I get the disillusioned feeling that novels, today, are sold by the pound, like groceries. It actually takes a great deal more discipline to be able to leave out rather than to throw in everything. This means that you have to say in one sentence precisely what you mean, instead of saying sort of what you kind of mean in hundreds of sentences and hoping the sum total will add up.

  Rona Jaffe

  Mean, Discipline, Feelings

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• In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.

  Lydia Davis

  Struggle, Winning, Translators

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• Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.

  Amy Sedaris

  School, Catholic, Stories

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• Life is the only sentence which doesn't end with a period.

  Lois Gould

  Life Is, Ends, Periods

  Lois Gould (1970). “Such good friends”, Random House Trade

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• First sentences are doors to worlds.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Doors, World, Firsts

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2018). “Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.200, Hachette UK

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• I am to consider the many advantages arising from a frequent use of oaths, curses, and imprecations. In the first place, this genteel accomplishment is a wonderful help to discourse; as it supplies the want of good sense, learning, and eloquence. The illiterate and stupid, by the help of oaths, become orators; and he, whose wretched intellects would not permit him to utter a coherent sentence, by this easy practice, excites the laughter, and fixes the attention, of a brilliant and joyous circle.

  Mary Collyer

  Laughter, Stupid, Practice

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• A sentence well couched takes both the sense and understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches that are longer than the memory of man can fathom.

  Owen Feltham

  Memories, Men, Understanding

  Owen Feltham (1840). “Resolves: divine, moral and political”, p.50

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• I don't think I really accepted my power as a woman until I realized that no was a complete sentence. When I stopped making excuses for saying it and began creating boundaries in my life, I knew real power.

  Leeza Gibbons

  Real, Thinking, Creating

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• Essayists must not only be succinct but have original ideas and, even harder to come by, or to fake, likable voices. Consciously or not, they endeavor to win us over by charm. If an essayist can not only charm but write the unforgettable sentence, one that reveals the heart in a few words, I'm her slave.

  Cyra McFadden

  Writing, Heart, Winning

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