Sentences Quotes - Page 21

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

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• But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

  Polly Toynbee

  Jail, Reason Why, Crime

  "Amid this panic over stabbings, we are ignoring what really cuts crime" by Polly Toynbee, www.theguardian.com. June 09, 2006.

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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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• We put together a one-sentence petition asking Congress to censure President Clinton and move on to other pressing issues. We sent it to under 100 friends and family, and within a week we had 100,000 people sign the petition.

  Joan Blades

  Moving, Issues, People

  "MoveOn as an Instrument of the People". Interview with Terrence McNally, www.alternet.org. June 24, 2004.

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• Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

  David Crystal

  Reading, Yield, Giving

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• I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

  Ron Rash

  Decision, Stories, Dozen

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• Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

  Joseph Joubert

  Book, Writing, Ambition

  "The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert". Book by Joseph Joubert, translated by Paul Auster, 2005.

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• It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Giving, Faithful

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• In Washington, I found myself as a 31-year-old in a room with the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense, and I was unfazed by it. But get me around a rock star I grew up with and I have trouble completing sentences.

  Joe Scarborough

  Stars, Rocks, Years

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• Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

  Donald Hall

  Writing, Light, Hands

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.50, University of Michigan Press

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• I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.

  Ella Maillart

  Mould, Refuse

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• Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

  Roland Barthes

  Falling In Love, Memories, Desire

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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• Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Morning, Real, Dark

  "Handle with Care" (1936)

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• I thought Marcus was going to be in my life forever. Then I thought I was wrong. Now he’s back. But this time I know what’s certain: Marcus will be gone again, and back again and again and again because nothing is permanent. Especially people. Strangers become friends. Friends become lovers. Lovers become strangers. Strangers become friends once more, and over and over. Tomorrow, next week, fifty years from now, I know I’ll get another one-word postcard from Marcus, because this one doesn’t have a period signifying the end of the sentence. Or the end of anything at all.

  Megan McCafferty

  Love, Next Week, Years

  Megan McCafferty (2010). “The Complete Jessica Darling Series: Sloppy Firsts, Second Helpings, Charmed Thirds, Fourth Comings, Perfect Fifths”, p.1233, Crown

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• While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, Dream, Morning

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• For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.

  Jens Peter Jacobsen

  Dream, Mind, Suffering

  Jens Peter Jacobsen (2008). “Niels Lyhne”, p.45, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

  Ray Bradbury

  Teacher, School, Editors

  Ray Bradbury (1990). “Fahrenheit 451: Curriculum Unit”

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• Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

  Margaret Atwood

  Ideas, People, Soul

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• The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.

  Heinz Pagels

  Book, Science, Law

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• Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Thinking, East

  Journal (1867)

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• How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! How glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

  John Milton

  Death, Mother, Sleep

  John Milton, “Paradise Lost: Book 10”

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• Had I been brighter, the ladies been gentler, the Scotch been weaker, had the gods been kinder, had the dice been hotter, this could have been a one-sentence story: Once upon a time I lived happily ever after.

  Mickey Rooney

  Scotch, Once Upon A Time, Stories

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• In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. - Manifesto of the Communist Party

  Karl Marx

  Party, Liberty, May

  Karl Marx (2015). “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, p.18, Booklassic

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• All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Distance, Moving, Knowledge

  "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Physics textbook by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands, volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-2, "Matter is made of atoms"; p. 1-2, 1964.

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