Quotes About Sentences

Don't romanticize your vocation. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

Phrases can build grace into sentences. Taut declarations lend clarity, but too many of them can start to sound like a Dick-and-Jane story. A strategically placed phrase can turn a staccato burst into a more lyrical sentence. This is what we mean by "turning a phrase"—using our command of language and our mastery of the rhythms of a sentence to affect style as well as substance

Authors often leave their sentences unfinished like that—at least the kind who come to Wentworth's do—and they are always men. Women authors seem to bother less about local color, or perhaps they bother more. Perhaps they actually pack a couple of suitcases and trek off to Borneo or Canada or wherever it may be, before they send their hero there to hob-nob with head-hunters or to track moose.

If the beginning of wisdom is in realizing that one knows nothing, then the beginning of understanding is in realizing that all things exist in accord with a single truth: Large things are made of smaller things. Drops of ink are shaped into letters, letters form words, words form sentences, and sentences combine to express thought.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs.

all of this is such a long and dark and untellable story (untellable as all stories are). Meanwhile, one can only hold onto what is tangible and look at one's fingers, try to look into someone's eyes, and write down the sentences that are spoken, so that something is said by which one can begin to glimpse what really happened.

I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable.

For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, a kind of noman's land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it— a trap.

I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable. At

only because language has something in common with the world that it can be used to picture the world, so it is only because of logic that our sentences have meaning at all.

I don't believe we should allow thousands of violent felons to be released early from prison, nor do I believe we should reduce sentences for violent offenders in the future.

What to do about these increases in crime? Plenty of laws already exist to punish violent criminals, and research questions the level of correlation between longer sentences and lower crime rates.

Federal law provides very powerful tools, such as strict mandatory sentences, to go after repeat violent offenders who are illegally in the possession of a gun.

But he'd never forgotten. That moment. When he'd met kindness for the first time. And been shown the path to wisdom in four simple, though not easy, sentences.

His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment.

Silly language was very much a part of our lives so stringing together nice sentences and being conscious of interesting words were the sorts of things I enjoyed as a child.

Then my outrage wandered away: never do junk if you need to finish thoughts, sentences, or simple tasks.

The real tragedy of the federal criminal system is not the absurdities. It is the ruined and wasted lives. Congress demands long, harsh sentences, and for the violent thugs these are appropriate. Hardened criminals are locked away in "U.S. Pens," fortresses where gangs are rampant and murders are routine. But the majority of federal prisoners are nonviolent, and many are convicted of crimes that involved little, if any, criminal activity.

I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness

endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.

All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable...

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.