Sentences Quotes

• It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Crazy, Book, Reading

  108 Copy quote

• Nothing is more powerful than allowing yourself to truly be affected by things. Whether it’s a song, a stranger, a mountain, a tea kettle, an article, a sentence, a footstep -feel it all. Look around you. All of this is for you. Take it and have gratitude. Give it and feel love.

  Zooey Deschanel

  Song, Gratitude, Powerful

  33 Copy quote

• I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke

  Julian Clary

  Laughing, Thrill, Ends

  6 Copy quote

• For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.

  Lewis Carroll

  Art, Fall, Writing

  Lewis Carroll (2016). “Phantasmagoria”, p.152, Lewis Carroll

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• Our job is to make change. Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they'd like to go. Every time we waste that opportunity, every page or sentence that doesn't do enough to advance the cause is waste.

  Seth Godin

  Jobs, Opportunity, People

  9 Copy quote

• Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqeur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

  Bohumil Hrabal

  Beautiful, Heart, Blood

  Bohumil Hrabal (1992). “Too Loud a Solitude”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Stories, Done

  Kurt Vonnegut (1998). “Timequake”, p.109, Penguin

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• It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

  C. S. Lewis

  Powerful, Offering, Order

  10 Copy quote

• A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Writing, Insightful, Story Writers

  75 Copy quote

• He cannot complain of a hard sentence, who is made master of his own fate.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Fate, Destiny, Complaining

  9 Copy quote

• It’s not technically gossip if you start your sentence with “I’m really concerned about __________________ ,” (fill in the name of the person you’re not gossiping about).

  Brian P. Cleary

  Names, Gossip, Persons

  7 Copy quote

• If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

  Anne Carson

  Writing, Way, Life Is

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.

  Henning Mankell

  Sorry, Writing, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Henning Mankell from Mar 03, 2012

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• When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Our Words, Way, Disaster

  "Journey to the End of the Night". Book by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, 1932.

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• Life is the expression of tone. In that sentence is the basic principle of Chiropractic.

  Daniel D. Palmer

  Expression, Principles, Tone

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• If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

  John Irving

  Mean, Thinking, Interesting

  "Novelist John Irving Plays Not My Job". "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. June 14, 2012.

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• There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

  Terry Brooks

  Book, Writing, Simple

  Terry Brooks (2003). “Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life”, p.164, Del Rey

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• This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

  Douglas Hofstadter

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• How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Writing, Together

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• I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

  Rick Bass

  Real, Thinking, People

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• The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that's really intense. That's something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something's out there in the air that is really bad.

  Paul Reubens

  Sex, Children, Past

  "Pee-Wee Herman creator speaks out". Interview with Stone Phillips, www.nbcnews.com. April 5, 2004.

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• I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Odds

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

  Louis Begley

  Writing, Thinking, Self

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• When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

  Nicholson Baker

  People, Want, Bother

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• A clear sentence is no accident.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Clear, Accidents

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.9, Harper Collins

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