Sentences Quotes - Page 33

• I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences.

  Antjie Krog

  Thinking, People, Letters

  "I write because I can't speak" by Rory Carroll, www.theguardian.com. January 2, 2004.

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• I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

  Melissa Bank

  Real, Goal, Maps

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• Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs.

  Sarah Schulman

  Real, White, People

  Sarah Schulman (2012). “The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination”, p.104, Univ of California Press

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• To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

  Richard Rorty

  Age, Suggestions, Legacy

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.

  Paul Valery

  Giving, Effort, Everyday

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• To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Mean, Technique, Language

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958). “Philosophical investigations”

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• By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence - which is a noble thing. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English; I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.

  Winston Churchill

  Clever, Latin, Learning

  My Early Life ch. 2 (1930)

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• There are two sentences inscribed upon the Ancient oracle... "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much"; and upon these all other precepts depend.

  Plutarch

  Two, Oracles, Too Much

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• The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Attractive, Attractiveness, Wisest

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.29, David M Gross

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• True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.

  Zig Ziglar

  Success, Ideas, One Sentence

  Zig Ziglar, Tom Ziglar (2012). “Born to Win: Find Your Success Code”, p.37, AudioInk

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• Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre

  Samuel Johnson

  Pain, Home, Journey

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.429

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• The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.

  Robertson Davies

  Men, Average, Nasty

  Robertson Davies (1949). “The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks”, Clarke, Irwin

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• A good game has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it's fun.

  Paul Reiche III

  Fun, Games, Design

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• Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.

  Frederick Buechner

  Love, Justice, Judging

  Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

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• What is thy sentence then but speechless death.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Speechless

  William Shakespeare, John Payne Collier (1858). “Winter's tale. King John. King Richard II. King Henry IV, part 1. King Henry IV, part 2. Henry V. King Henry VI, part 1”, p.233

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• Every person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint.There are no two people alike. No two people who understand the same sentence the same way... So in dealing with people, you try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.

  Milton H. Erickson

  Unique, Two, People

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• If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

  Arthur Eddington

  Book, Writing, Army

  The Nature of the Physical World ch. 4 (1928)

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• To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

  John Ruskin

  Book, Knowledge And Power, Sight

  William Makepeace Thackeray, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot (1910). “Essays, English and American: With Introductions and Notes”

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• You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.

  Caitlin Moran

  Beautiful, Writing, Feminist

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• Take it from me, marriage isn't a word - it's a sentence.

  King Vidor

  Marriage

  'The Crowd' (1928 film)

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• Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

  Clive James

  Water, Ponds, Verbs

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• Our capitol punishment system is haunted by the demon of error- error in determining guilt, error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die... The legislation couldn't reform it. Lawmakers won't repeal it. I won't stand for it. I had to act... I am commuting the sentences of all death row inmates.

  George Ryan

  Animal, Errors, Punishment

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• There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

  Susan Orlean

  Writing, Sound, Mastery

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• You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Doe, Needs

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• I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing

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