Sentences Quotes - Page 6

• A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

  Gertrude Stein

  Emotional, Language, Paragraph

  Gertrude Stein, Joan Retallack (2008). “Gertrude Stein: Selections”, p.242, Univ of California Press

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• The turn of a sentence has decided the fate of many a friendship, and, for aught that we know, the fate of many a kingdom.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Fate, Kingdoms, Turns

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• What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.

  Anna Quindlen

  Friendship, Women, Heart

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.32, Ballantine Books

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• A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition.

  Joseph Joubert

  Essence, Ideas, Giving

  Joseph Joubert (1867). “Some of the "Thoughts" of Joseph Joubert”, p.150

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• Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

  Fay Weldon

  Circles, Forever, Sound

  Fay Weldon (1984). “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil”, Pantheon

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• Life is the expression of tone. In that sentence is the basic principle of Chiropractic.

  Daniel D. Palmer

  Expression, Principles, Tone

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• There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

  Terry Brooks

  Book, Writing, Simple

  Terry Brooks (2003). “Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life”, p.164, Del Rey

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• How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Writing, Together

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• Do not give sentence in another tribunal till you have been yourself judged in the tribunal of Justice.

  Epictetus

  Giving, Justice, Tribunals

  Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (2016). “Stoic Six Pack: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion”, p.191, Enhanced Media Publishing

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

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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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• I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

  Rick Bass

  Real, Thinking, People

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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 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

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

  Amy Tan

  Writing, Fiction, Rewards

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

  Ella Maillart

  Mould, Refuse

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• I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.

  Matthew Perry

  Names, Attention, Come Up

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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

  James Patterson

  Writing, Trying, Stories

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• I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that's great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn't care less.

  William T. Vollmann

  Beautiful, Falling In Love, Race

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• 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

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• If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!'

  David Mermin

  Would Be, Shut Up, Copenhagen

  N. David Mermin (2016). “Why Quark Rhymes with Pork: And Other Scientific Diversions”, p.38, Cambridge University Press

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• 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

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