Quotes About Sentence

I have the death sentence in seven genres.

To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.

The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...

I would like to be able to convey to you the sound of dead voices, to break open this unbearable tomb of sound, to wrest something more than silhouettes from vanished years and by some unimaginable trick let you hear the ha-ha-ha with which Catulle Mendès accompanied the slightest sentence, the muffled voice of Edmond Rostand or the laughter which Proust smeared over his face with his white-gloved hand and his beard.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn't change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.

Jeg har skrevet hele mit liv og nærer en romantisk drøm om at dø midt i en sætning.

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

You think it amusing to have a death sentence imposed on us, sire?

Towards dawn, as we were making camp, Vancha suddenly burst out laughing. Look at us! he hooted, as we stared at him uncertainly. We've been moping all night like four sad souls at a funeral. What idiots we've been! You think it amusing to have a death sentence imposed on us, Sire? Mr. Crepsley asked archly. Charna's guts! Vancha cursed. The sentence has been there since the start — all that's changed is that we know about it! A little knowledge is a... dangerous thing, Harkat muttered.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one's mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!

Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.

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.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

The middle of the sentence had already left the beginning of the sentence lost in the distance, and the end of the sentence was slower to arrive than a school holiday.

it is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the rôle of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

The life of the person sentenced to this punishment trickled away drop by drop.

I recall with sorrow the demise of 233 party cadres who lost their lives after the special court delivered its verdict on my sentence.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

I start with voice, maybe a sentence. That sentence might embody an image, and I go from there. One sentence to the next. Sound drives the work these days - sound before description.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.