Sentences Quotes - Page 27

• I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

  James Thurber

  Book, Reading, Method

  James Thurber (1990). “Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself”

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• I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

  Barack Obama

  Appreciation, Book, Cutting

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.9, Canongate Books

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• If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

  John McPhee

  Motivational, Writing, Marine

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.127, Macmillan

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• I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Technique, Lines, Firsts

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• In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

  Ian Mcewan

  Reading, Writing, Mean

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• Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.

  Orson Scott Card

  Years, Parent, Prison

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• Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

  Don DeLillo

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.

  Amy Bloom

  Writing, Practice, Differences

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• The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.

  David Sedaris

  Men, Way, Korean

  "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim". Book by David Sedaris, June 1, 2004.

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• the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Might, Lasts, Ends

  Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1960.

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• Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Writing, Years

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• It was in the spring that Josephine and I had first loved each other, or, at least, had first come into the full knowledge that we loved. I think that we must have loved each other all our lives, and that each succeeding spring was a word in the revelation of that love, not to be understood until, in the fullness of time, the whole sentence was written out in that most beautiful of all beautiful springs.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Beautiful, Spring, Thinking

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2016). “ANNE OF GREEN GABLES - Complete Collection: ALL 14 Books in One Volume (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Rainbow Valley, The Story Girl, Chronicles of Avonlea and more): Including Letters and Autobiography of Lucy Maud Montgomery”, p.2489, e-artnow

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• No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

  Brenda Ueland

  Writing, Imagination, Creative

  Brenda Ueland (2013). “If You Want to Write”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Betrayal, War, Heart

  FaceBook post by Michael Ondaatje from Nov 22, 2015

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• To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

  George Orwell

  Art, Latin, Struggle

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• Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

  Ayn Rand

  Running, Mean, Gun

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.73, Penguin

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• I have the death sentence in seven genres.

  Jasper Fforde

  Seven, Genre, Death Sentence

  Jasper Fforde (2004). “The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel”, p.57, Penguin

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• In my sentences I go where no man has gone before.

  George W. Bush

  Men, Gone, Funny Bush

  George W. Bush's speech at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, www.c-span.org. March 29, 2001.

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• How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

  Jodi Picoult

  Rain, Home, Hair

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• A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Ends, Should, Pens

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.996, Delphi Classics

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• I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

  Bill Bryson

  Nebraska, Want, Helping

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• I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Army, Two

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.99, Wordsworth Editions

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• A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

  Billy Collins

  Wind, Midnight, Tails

  Billy Collins (2011). “Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems”, p.9, Random House

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• Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence. Circe Berman: Who isn't?.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Middle

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• I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said. Two sentences," said Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. "You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said. No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.

  James Joyce

  Mean, Order, Two

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