Sentences Quotes

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

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Crazy, Book, Reading

  87 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

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  8 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

  52 Copy quote

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

  Friedrich Schiller

  Fate, Destiny, Complaining

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• 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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• 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

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

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Writing, Insightful, Story Writers

  73 Copy quote

• 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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• I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

  Alice Munro

  Care, Might, Saws

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.354, Vintage

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• Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Taken, Writing, Weight

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.84, Macmillan

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• Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.

  William Allen White

  Writing, Mean, Editors

  24 Copy quote

• The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Long, Secret

  19 Copy quote

• Oh, sweet the joy this sentence gives: ‘I know that my Redeemer lives!’

  Thomas S. Monson

  Sweet, Giving, Joy

  6 Copy quote

• You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

  Satya Nadella

  Couple, Essence, Trying

  "Satya Nadella named Microsoft CEO as Bill Gates steps down as chairman" by Dominic Rushe, www.theguardian.com. February 4, 2014.

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• An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Light, Lamps, Fling

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1852). “Romance and reality”, p.70

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• Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

  Susan Sontag

  Attention, World, Pay

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.267, Macmillan

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• If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Believe, Thinking, Political

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

  John Fowles

  Thinking, Imagination, Empathy

  19 Copy quote

• In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.

  John Tukey

  Thinking, Data, Simplicity

  25 Copy quote

• I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Heart, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

  Marie Howe

  Sleep, Tangled, Plight

  "The Good Thief". Book by Marie Howe, 1988.

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