Paragraph Quotes - Page 5

• I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.

  Anthony Lane

  Morning, Writing, Two

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• With Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward has written the best sort of novel-a beautiful, important book that's both unflinching and tender, heartbreaking and triumphant. A lyrical and riveting testament to the strength of the human spirit, as well as the power of family and community. Ward's paragraphs are like songs, lifting us even as the authenticity of this world and these characters keeps the ground in clear sight. This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary writer.

  Skip Horack

  Beautiful, Song, Book

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• Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.

  Sarah Vowell

  Real, School, Caring

  FaceBook post by Sarah Vowell from Aug 29, 2015

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• Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Writing, Way, Fiction

  6 Copy quote

• You kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you're gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. In the end, it does nothing. Nothing changes. The world goes on and you're gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.

  Eddie Vedder

  Revenge, Sacrifice, Trying

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

  Peter Straub

  Book, Self, Joy

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• Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Mistake, Media, Editors

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• The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

  Rick Moody

  Personality, Trying, Process

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• It gave me no chance. He (Nolan Ryan) just blew it (strikeout #5,000) by me. But its an honor. I'll have another paragraph in all the baseball books. I'm already in the books three or four times.

  Rickey Henderson

  Baseball, Book, Honor

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• Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.

  Erich Fromm

  Powerful, Book, Ideas

  Erich Fromm (2011). “The Revolution of Hope”, p.152, Lantern Books

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• And that's one thing that helps me is I learn it blandly, vanilla, then I don't try to act it too soon because you start to act it, and you kind of go away from what the next sentence is, what the next paragraph is. So get it down so it kind of can - it's in there so you can then, as I call it, dance on top of it.

  Jeff Daniels

  Inspirational, Dance, Going Away

  "Jeff Daniels: Anchoring The Cast Of "The Newsroom". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. June 20, 2012.

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• When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Writing, Next Day, Use

  4 Copy quote

• During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious.

  Patricia Briggs

  Memories, College, Years

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• I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, Sound, Plot

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• I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it

  Clifford Geertz

  Satisfied, Sentences

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• If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.

  Susan Jacoby

  Believe, Media, Two

  FaceBook post by Susan Jacoby from Oct 13, 2012

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• If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

  Martin Gardner

  Lying, Cat, Answers

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• Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

  Robert Peel

  Feelings, Weakness, Public Opinion

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• To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.

  Margaret Fuller

  Writing, Hours, Scene

  Margaret Fuller (1860). “At Home and Abroad, Or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe”, p.8

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• Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.

  Dr. Seuss

  Children, Writing, Murder

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• Elisabeth Sheffield's new novel is multilayered, smart, beautifully written, and funny. I was taken in by the first paragraph and held firmly through the roller coaster of a ride. The depth of the novel was evidenced by the constantly shifting meaning of the title itself. In fact, the entire work never changes its meaning, but somehow, seamlessly, simply means more. This is a rare and memorable piece of work.

  Percival Everett

  Smart, Taken, Mean

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• I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books.

  Ronald Reagan

  Book, Government, Organization

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• I'll get a three-page letter and the last paragraph says 'I know you'll never read this, but here's my number.' I love to call those people because the first thing they say is, 'Governor, I didn't mean everything I said in the letter about you.'

  Dave Heineman

  Love, Mean, Numbers

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• Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Girl, Fall, Believe

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.94, Vintage

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• This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

  Jim Harrison

  Morning, Reading, Coffee

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