Sentences Quotes - Page 29

• The correct way to punctuate a sentence that states: "Of course it is none of my business, but -- " is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Cutting, Use, Way

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.327, Penguin

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• Madame Bellwings, Memoir Elf Coordinator, was not at all pleased with this request, because elves who write the memoirs of teenage girls have the habit of returning to the magical realm with atrocious grammar. They can't seem to shake the phrases "watever" and "no way," and they insert the word like into so many sentences that the other elves start slapping them...and for no apparent reason occasionally call out the name Edward Cullen.

  Janette Rallison

  Girl, Teenage, Writing

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• I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

  Amy Hempel

  Moved

  Amy Hempel, Rick Moody (2007). “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel”, p.106, Simon and Schuster

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• This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.

  Sarah Dessen

  Waiting, Over You, Finishing

  "Just Listen". Book by Sarah Dessen, 2006.

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• I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it's painful gall-stones, it's gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul.

  Henry Miller

  Running, Mirrors, Blood

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• To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Light, Ideas

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• Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Girl, Book, Toss

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• A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.

  Max Lucado

  Book, Garden, Hands

  Max Lucado (2012). “A Gentle Thunder: Hearing God Through the Storm”, p.11, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

  Jennifer Donnelly

  Voice, People, Feelings

  Jennifer Donnelly (2015). “A Gathering Light”, p.22, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

  Gore Vidal

  Writing, Cities, Perfect

  Gore Vidal, Richard Peabody, Lucinda Ebersole (2005). “Conversations with Gore Vidal”, p.137, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love.

  Julian Gough

  Real, Moving, Shapes

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• I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.

  Muriel Barbery

  Teaching, Giving, Joy

  "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, September 2, 2013.

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• I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.

  Mary Karr

  Moving, Hands, Numbers

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• Mack was getting frustrated. He spoke louder, 'But, don't I have a right to...' To complete a sentence without being interrupted? Not in reality. But as long as you think you do, you will surely get ticked off when someone cuts you off, even if it is God.

  William P. Young

  Cutting, Reality, Thinking

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• In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Lying, People, Library

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.72, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• …I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

  Grace Paley

  Beautiful, Lying, Writing

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• Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

  Stephen King

  Sometimes, Breathe, Paragraph

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.130, Simon and Schuster

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• ...when a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Stronger, Vigor, Made

  William Strunk Jr., E.B. White (1962). “the Elements of Style”

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• I’ve heard it said: ‘By his home you shall know him’; and we all know that we must pay attention to anyone who reverses the subject and auxiliary verb in his sentence.

  Steven Brust

  Home, Verbs, Attention

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• In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

  Werner Herzog

  Half, Dinosaurs, Faces

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• When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

  Louise Erdrich

  Stories, Shapes, Young

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• I shouldn't have said it, but the word slipped out of my mouth as easy as air. it wasn't exactly the kind of work any well-behaved student would use, which sort of explained why I had just used it. And it certainly isn't the most elegant way to start off a story, but it honestly represents what I was feeling. Besides, I could have said something a lot stronger. But not everybody wants to read a story with those kinds of words and thoughts being expressed in the very first sentence. "Stop swearing," Jason screamed.

  Obert Skye

  Air, Feelings, Stronger

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• To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

  Aleister Crowley

  Hands, Plums, Verbs

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• I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Long, Finals, Language

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.20, A&C Black

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• I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.

  Brenda Ueland

  Fun, Writing, People

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