Sentences Quotes - Page 4

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm so uncomfortable, especially in emotional situations, having to say sentences that don't feel right. As an actor - or really, as any kind of person sensitive to it.

  Franka Potente

  Emotional, Actors, Kind

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

  Tom Perrotta

  Lost Love, School, Stories

  7 Copy quote

• My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs because, full disclosure: I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then I'm energized but not so awake that the critical voice clicks on, the voice that sometimes says, "Don't write that," or "Man, that sentence is terrible - you should give up and go pet the cats."

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Giving Up, Coffee, Writing

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

  Amy Tan

  Writing, Fiction, Rewards

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Ella Maillart

  Mould, Refuse

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

  James Patterson

  Writing, Trying, Stories

  41 Copy quote

• In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Children, Mean, Blessing

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2014). “Suffering, Suicide and Immortality: Eight Essays from The Parerga”, p.3, Courier Corporation

  41 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing.

  Keith Gessen

  Thinking, Genius, Manage

  4 Copy quote

• If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

  Adam Haslett

  Bars, Shooting, Indecision

  "How To Write a (Good) Sentence" by Adam Haslett, www.slate.com. January 23, 2011.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

  Peter Farb

  Mistake, School, Speech

  Peter Farb (2015). “Word Play: What Happens When People Talk”, p.258, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white.

  Alfred Tarski

  Ifs And, White, Snow

  Alfred Tarski (1986). “Alfred Tarski, Collected Papers: 1935-1944”, Birkhauser

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved... I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p. 182, 1982.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Independent, Conversation, Circumstances

  5 Copy quote

• If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

  Salman Rushdie

  India, Phrases, Speech

  "Salman Rushdie". Salon Interview, www.salon.com. January 28, 1996.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• After 15 years of work I have achieved, as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower, the unity of the German nation, and have freed it from the death sentence of Versailles.

  Adolf Hitler

  Years, Soldier, Unity

  Proclamation, 21 Dec. 1941

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Odds

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All the elements in an advertisement are primarily designed to do one thing and one thing only: get you to read the first sentence of the copy.

  Joseph Sugarman

  Firsts, Elements, Copies

  Joseph Sugarman (2012). “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters”, p.38, John Wiley & Sons

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

  Jacques Barzun

  Art, Pain, Taken

  "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" by Jacques Barzun in "The Kenyon Review", Volume 5, No. 3 (pp. 321-345), Part II, www.jstor.org. Summer 1943.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Real, Character, Men

  Maria Edgeworth “Castle Rackrent”, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

  Doris Lessing

  Dialect, Development, Association

  Doris Lessing (1979). “Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 : Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His Day is marching on.

  Julia Ward Howe

  Marching On, Dew, Lamps

  Julia Ward Howe (1866). “Later Lyrics”, p.41

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I usually give a book 40 pages. If it doesn't grab me by then, adios. With young adult books, you can usually tell by Page 4 if it's worth the time. The author establishes the conflict early, sometimes in the first sentence. The themes of hope, family, friendship and overcoming hardship appeal to most everyone.

  Regina Brett

  Book, Giving, Overcoming

  5 Copy quote