Quotes About Clauses

When the First Amendment was finally approved, it contained two separate clauses on religion, each with an independent scope of action. The first clause (called the Establishment Clause) prohibited the federal government from establishing a single national denomination; the second clause (called the Free Exercise Clause) prohibited the federal government from interfering with the people's public religious expressions and acknowledgments.

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page, are letters up to no good, clutches of clauses so subordinate they'll never let her get away. From, The Joy of Writing, Wislawa Szymborska

A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction--besides unexpected interludes--has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.

Your letter] is a morass of confusion, wordiness, overloaded sentences and strained metaphors… [The greater part of it is incomprehensible], or else it is that I have neither the time nor the patience to dig the principle sentence out of the surrounding forests of subordinate clauses." – Vera Brittain to her husband George Catlin, 1925.

The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly too.

You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

What do you call Santa's little helpers? Subordinate Clauses!

the patron must have been wealthy enough to afford these expensive materials – we know that paintings such as these were seen as symbols of wealth since in the contracts between artists and patrons there were often clauses stating how much gold and semi-precious pigments were to be used.

Even the little bit that must be known will block easy entry to the story if it delays the action line. The secret, Hunter Thompson said, is to "blend, blend, blend." You launch action immediately and then blend the exposition into it, submerging it in modifiers, subordinate clauses, appositives, and the like.

was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he had murdered. Two independent clauses, ten words each, joined by an adverb, made up entirely of words that would once have been unimaginable to think, much less say.

building a tower of description that was in constant danger of toppling over as more and more clauses were thrown on to it, adjectives and adverbs, bounteous, haltingly, found in pockets and pitched on, similes not spared, prepositions dangling and otherwise, metaphors