Sentences Quotes - Page 14

• Barry recounts all this in prose of often startling beauty. Just as he describes people stopping in the street to look at Roseanne, so I often found myself stopping to look at the sentences he gave her, wanting to pause and copy them down.

  Margot Livesey

  People, Stopping, Looks

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• There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

  Gertrude Stein

  Language, Natural, Found

  Gertrude Stein, Ulla E. Dydo (1993). “A Stein Reader”, p.551, Northwestern University Press

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• Life--a lifelong death sentence.

  Julian Tuwim

  Lifelong, Death Sentence

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• sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

  Rebecca West

  Cat, Men, Feelings

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.13, Open Road Media

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• A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition.

  Joseph Joubert

  Essence, Ideas, Giving

  Joseph Joubert (1867). “Some of the "Thoughts" of Joseph Joubert”, p.150

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• I never saw so intelligent a man have so much trouble in getting out a connected sentence. Ever since I have known him, he has desired to have a long talk with me, but he never gets started; and yet each time he meets me with renewed zest for the outpouring. It is like getting congealed liquid from a demijohn; you know the jug is large and full, but getting the contents out is the problem.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Intelligent, Men, Zest

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot (Stanton). Blatch (Mrs) (1922). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences”

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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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• 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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• There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

  Rachel Cusk

  Art, Writing, Reality

  "Go Forth (Vol. 34)". Interview with Alice Whitwham, logger.believermag.com. June 17, 2015.

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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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• 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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• 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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• To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

  Virginia Woolf

  Heart, Fire, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3635, Delphi Classics

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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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• There's a death sentence for your Robin of Locksley.

  Claude Rains

  Robins, Death Sentence

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• What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hard Work, Writing, Pages

  Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1932-1935”

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• They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Speech, Firsts, Hardest

  "The Poet and the World". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1996.

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• I think writing letters is a lost art, but nowadays it's something that means even more, because it's so easy to communicate in so many different ways. But I find a love letter can even be a little post-it note stuck in your pocket, with a sentence or a few words.

  Hilary Swank

  Art, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

  John Updike

  Book, Thinking, Interesting

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.210, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man.

  Clarence Manion

  Father, Men, Self

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• If I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority?

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  People, Majority, Groups

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• The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

  Mary Karr

  Book, Healing, Body

  Mary Karr (2001). “Cherry”, p.173, Penguin

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