In Sentence Quotes

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). ( ... ) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life. ~ Michael Dirda

Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler.
I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on.
I paid my dues along with everybody else," he said.
It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: "Entschuldigen Sie."
Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I Beg Your Pardon," or "Excuse Me. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Being in love with somebody that you only used to know is like falling in love with a book (which sounds like a dumb example but people really do fall in love with them). The point is: You can love it all you want, but it's a story that runs parallel to yours. At the end of the day it's static. It's memory. It's a sentence and you can't change it. It ends how it ends. It says what it says. ~ Brianna Wiest

When Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant met in what is still considered the biggest wrestling match of all time, exaggeration was in the air. According to various contemporary reports, there were 95,000 people on hand at WrestleMania III to see the 7-foot-5, 525-pound Andre square off against Hulk Hogan, who stood 6-foot-8 and weighed 320 pounds and whose biceps measured twenty-four inches around. Probably the only number in that last sentence that's unimpeachable is the III. ~ David Shoemaker

Oh, I know I'll improve. It's just that my life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes now. That's a sentence I read once, and I say it over to comfort myself in these times that try the soul. ~ Anne Shirley

There seems little or no hope for the adult writer who produces sentences like these: "Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time." The phrase "Her cheeks were thick and smooth" is normal English, but "[Her cheeks] held a healthy natural red color" is elevated, pseudo-poetic. The word "held" faintly hints at personification of "cheeks," and "healthy natural red color" is clunky, stilted, slightly bookish. The second sentence contains similar mistakes. The diction level of "extended to the intersection of her lips" is high and formal, in ferocious conflict with the end of the sentence, which plunges to the colloquial "most of the time. ~ John Gardner

I'd be honored to be in the same sentence as Tom Hardy. I've been a twin since the day I was born - fraternal, but we look a lot alike - so I've already been mixed up with another man my entire life. ~ Logan Marshall-Green

The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that's really intense. That's something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something's out there in the air that is really bad. ~ Paul Reubens

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Sam Vimes could parallel process. Most husbands can. They learn to follow their own line of thought while at the same time listening to what their wives say. And the listening is important, because at any time they could be challenged and must be ready to quote the last sentence in full. A vital additional skill is being able to scan the dialogue for telltale phrases such as "and they can deliver it tomorrow" or "so I've invited them for dinner?" or "they can do it in blue, really quite cheaply. ~ Terry Pratchett

Reading Aloud to My Father

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same --
Chopin's Piano Concerto - he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free. ~ Jane Kenyon

First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end. ~ Bertrand Russell

How could one sentence uttered in anger cause so much damage? But then words were the most powerful thing in the universe. Cuts and bruises always healed, but words spoken in anger were most often permanent. They didn't damage the body, they destroyed the spirit. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Every pain, every sorrow, every worry, and the betrayal. Hearing him say Fionna and sex in the same sentence and demeaning my insecurities pushed me over the edge. If someone had told me I was crying I wouldn't have believed them because in that moment all I felt was contempt. Before I knew what I was doing my hand reached out and skid across his cheek. I instantly felt the sting of the slap. I dismissed the pain. I planted both hand on his chest and pushed with all my strength. I was ready to attack him again when he grabbed my arms and held them tight. The harder I fought the harder he held me ~ Angie Merriam

Theodore Sorensen wrote for [Robert Kennedy's 1968] announcement speech: "At stake is not simply the leadership of our party, and even our own country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet." The sentence absolutely appalled all the younger Robert Kennedy advisers, who felt it smacked of just the kind of attitude which had gotten us into Vietnam. Nonetheless, despite their protests, it stayed in the speech. ~ David Halberstam

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. ~ Virginia Woolf

The only french sentence he could call to mind was a passage which had caused him some trouble in class the previous day. So far as he had been able to judge the translation was: 'the gentleman who wears one green hat approaches himself all of a sudden. ~ Anthony Buckeridge

This country you're sitting in right now was not built on love, hugs, time-outs and trophies you didn't earn. This country was built on shame, humiliation and striving to be better. By the way, if you're in this room right now and you're successful ... you didn't get there because someone loved you too much or gave you too many hugs or you got a trophy when you lost. You did it because at one point in your life, somebody turned to you and said you're a loser, and in that second, you decided to bust your ass to make them choke on that sentence ... Or, your parents gave you the money. ~ Christopher Titus

We talk of the callousness of the young. 'Children can be so cruel,' we say. But only those who are concerned with others can be cruel. Children are both careless and carefree in their connections with others. For one nine-year-old to think passingly about the non-swimming agonies of another would be ridiculous.

There were contemporaries of mine at prep school who laboured and tortured themselves over their absolute failure to understand the rudiments of sentence structure: the nominative and accusative in Latin and Greek, the concept of an indirect object, the ablative absolute and the sequence of tenses – these things kept them awake at night. There were others who tossed in insomniac misery because of their fatness, freckledness or squintedness. I don't remember, I don't remember because I didn't care. Only my own agony mattered. ~ Stephen Fry

When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no assessment is possible. Every person who says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is declaring that a points system exists; that you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some sort of a number against an achievement.
But never at any time has a code of practice been laid down for the awarding of points. No offense intended to anyone. Never at any time in the history of the world has anyone - for anything ever so slightly more complicated than the straightforward play of a ball or a 400-meter race - been able to come up with a code of practice that could be learned and followed by several different people, in such a way that they would all arrive at the same mark. Never at any time have they been able to agree on a method for determining when one drawing, one meal, one sentence, one insult, the picking of one lock, one blow, one patriotic song, one Danish essay, one playground, one frog, or one interview is good or bad or better or worse than another. ~ Peter Høeg

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. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: "It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all." If ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am. ~ Alice Hoffman

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it. ~ Ayn Rand

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

All energy contains consciousness. That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world. ~ Seth

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to ris ~ Jonathan Franzen

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence 'Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde oui le rire des filles elate le mieux … ' as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face. ~ Virginia Woolf

What you said before," she asked. "That Jace Herondale loves Clarissa Fairchild more than anyone you've ever known except someone - you never finished the sentence. Who was it?"
"I was going to say you and me and Will," he said. "But - that's rather a strange thing to say, isn't it?"
"Not strange at all." She cuddled in close against his side. "Exactly right. Ever and always, exactly right. ~ Cassandra Clare

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round. ~ Richard Flanagan

In the interests of friendship, I hope you'll forgive me what I'm about to do."
"Forgive you wha - "
My sentence was cut off as he clamped his mouth over mine, kissing me deeply.

...

"Ready to make a scene?"
He raised an eyebrow. "Do I have a choice?"
"Not really. To quote something someone said to me recently, in the interests of friendship, I hope you'll forgive what I'm about to do." I drew back my hand and slapped him across the face. The smack of flesh striking flesh echoed through the hall. Conversations stopped as people whipped around to stare at us. Raising my voice to something just below a shout, I snarled, "You asshole! ~ Seanan McGuire

What you did was to draw a conclusion from a descriptive sentence
That person
wants to live too'
to what we call a normative sentence: 'Therefore you ought not to kill them.' From the point of view of reason this is nonsense. You might just as well say 'There are lots of people who cheat on their taxes, therefore I ought to cheat on my taxes too.' Hume said you can never draw conclusions from is sentences to ought sentences. Nevertheless it is exceedingly common, not least in newspaper articles, political party programs, and speeches. ~ Jostein Gaarder

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that. ~ Keren Ann

Nobody seems to bore you," he objected
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty good average, don't you?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled so little at hunting her sentence. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Come, Spirits she murmured; and was instantly fortified by a sense of the presence of the things that aren't there. There were the beautiful drowned statues, there were the glens and hills of an undiscovered country; there were divine musical notes, which, struck high up in the air, made one's heart beat with delight at the assurance that the world of things that aren't there was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

This has just came in from high command. There will be no loitering on the beachhead. Anyone found skinny dipping or fishing with grenades will be put on a charge. Two marines have already been disciplined for this offence.' A few men laughed and he smiled. 'Also there will be no fraternisation with the local female populace. This will not be tolerated. High command believe they may well carry some exotic disease our doctors may not be able to treat.' That brought a little more laughter. 'Again two marines have already been disciplined,' the rest of his sentence was drowned out by the laughter. He waited until it died down again. 'In their defence the marines stated that the females plied them with a local beverage made from coconuts. As there doesn't seem to be any coconut trees in space the high command disbelieved their story. So don't try it, you won't get away with it. ~ J.W. Murison

When a person pauses in mid-sentence to choose a word, that's the best time to jump in and change the subject! It's like an interception in football! You grab the others guy's idea and run the opposite way with it! The more sentences you complete, the higher your score! The idea is to block the other guy's thoughts and express your own! That's how you win!

Conversations aren't contests!

Ok, a point for you, but I'm still ahead. ~ Bill Watterson

I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. ~ Willa Cather

That's the magic of literature. We read a story, and something happens. We don't know what or why, nor which sentence it was responsible, but the world has changed and will never be the same again. Sometimes it takes us several years to realize that a book tore a hole in reality through which we could escape from the pettiness and despondency of our surroundings. ~ Nina George

I cannot imagine a sentence more severe than a person limited not by his or her own abilities but by the opinions and expectations of others. And having been made to organize in such a way, comes the remuneration, but no penance or escape. ~ Noorilhuda

Alethea Black can drop you into a dream with a single sentence, then convince you it's real. Her characters' best hopes and worst fears usually come to pass, often in fabulous ways, but their adventures feel inevitable and true-not only because Ms. Black richly imagines her people, but because she loves them. I Knew You'd Be Lovely is a lovely debut, with masterful prose and inspired invention on every page. ~ Ralph Lombreglia

Ask yourself what you like to think about. Problems associated with your technical specialty? Would you be unhappy making a career shift into a new area? Do you see yourself, in the future, as more of an individual contributor or a manager?

If you do think you want to specialize, here is the acid test: Your skills and talents are sufficiently deep and leading-edge for you to be able to complete a sentence that sounds something like this: "I am uniquely qualified for this because I am one of a handful of people who have the depth of knowledge to… ~ Barbara Moses

Whoa, whoa, whoa," Mark said. "It couldn't have been that long. It happened to us just a few days ago." "I don't like it ... when people doubt my words," Jed said, his tone changing drastically in the middle of his sentence. It suddenly turned threatening. "How can you sit there and accuse me of lying? Why would I lie about such a thing? I've tried to make peace with you, give you a second chance in this life, and this is how you repay me?" His voice had risen in volume with every passing word until he was shouting, his body trembling. "It ... it makes my head hurt." Mark could tell Alec was about to explode, so he quickly reached over and squeezed his arm. "Don't," he whispered. "Just don't." Then he returned his attention to Jed. "No, listen, please. It's not like that. We just want to understand. Our village had the ... ~ James Dashner

I was brought up in a family of leaders, and I think leadership is a life sentence. I like changing things that will shape the future. ~ Jenny Shipley

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time. ~ Stephen Hawking

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

Can you tell me in one sentence what is meant by logotherapy?" he asked. "At least, what is the difference between psychoanalysis and logotherapy?" "Yes," I said, "but in the first place, can you tell me in one sentence what you think the essence of psychoanalysis is?" This was his answer: "During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell." Whereupon I immediately retorted with the following improvisation: "Now, in logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read). ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

For the world's greatest assassin, this is pathetic," said Dorian, stepping from the doorway. She yelped and swung toward him. She wore a tunic and pants, and her hair was unbound. He leaned against the table, smiling as she turned a deep shade of red. "If you're going to insult me, you can shove this - " She lifted the cue in the air and made an obscene gesture that finished her sentence. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search ... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable. ~ Italo Calvino

A trick I picked up from reading Frank Miller scripts: ... He tended to always start his panel caps sometimes with a general noun and a verb. 'He weeps,' and then there'd be whatever else. And a couple of collaborators of mine have always said that the first sentence of my script is for them, and everything else that comes after is for me. Which is true, that's very much how I try to write. The first line is just to get the physical action down, and then I'll kind of drift off into whatever else I see in my head and they can take it or leave it. ~ Matt Fraction

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong. ~ Steven Pinker

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It's not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence ~ Martin Amis

If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets. ~ Robert M. Sapolsky

Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal! ~ Dick Meyer

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of "food" and "dirt" in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one's supply chain to learn where things are coming from. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees. ~ Dick Cavett

The writing in Mission to Paris, sentence after sentence, page after page, is dazzling. If you are a John le Carr fan, this is definitely a novel for you. ~ James Patterson

John!" cried Lady Greystoke, running toward him, "how could I have been mistaken? I-" but the rest of the sentence was lost as Tarzan of the Apes sprang into the room and taking his mate in his arms covered her lips with kisses. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

Yeah, we don't consider many stupid things. I mean, we get rid of 'em fast ... Just getting rid of the nonsense
just figuring out that if people call you and say, 'I've got this great, wonderful idea', you don't spend 10 minutes once you know in the first sentence that it isn't a great, wonderful idea ... Don't be polite and go through the whole process. ~ Warren Buffett

It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Not long ago Aveline got a call from the county sheriff for Index, Washington. Local fishermen found a drifter by the name of Moss Ballot dead on the banks of the Skykomish River. There were no signs of struggle, only whiskey in his blood and traces of river in his lungs, likely from having fallen face-first and taken his last breaths underwater. He'd set up camp in the trees under a tarp. It seemed he'd been there for a while, living off fish and canned beans. There wasn't much worth keeping, according to the sheriff. He did say that inside the wax duffel bag there was a diary, the one I'd given to him, it turns out. Inside it were written the words *For my children Wes and Annaclaire in care of Aveline Blue, Burden Falls, Montana*. There was one sentence, the start of a story never written but told nonetheless: *I lose everything*. The rest of the pages were blank. ~ Susan Bernhard

HE WAS KNOWN As DJANGO, a Gypsy name meaning "I awake." His legal name-the name the gendarmes and border officials entered into their journals as his family crisscrossed Europe in their horsedrawn caravan-was jean Reinhardt. But when the family brought their travels to a halt alongside a hidden stream or within a safe wood to light their cookfire, they called him only by his Romany name. Even among his fellow Gypsies, "Django" was a strange name, a strong, telegraphic sentence due to its first-person verb construction. It was a name of which Django was exceedingly proud. It bore an immediacy, a sense of life, and a vision of destiny. ~ Michael Dregni

In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again. ~ Cat Stevens

I wrote to Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I said: "Here is the sentence once written by the immortal Bobby Jones. I thought you might like to have it done in needlepoint and mounted in a suitable frame to hang over Little John's bed. It says, The rewards of golf - and of life, too, I expect - are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules." I never heard from Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I can only conclude that the letter went astray. ~ Alistair Cooke

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence - especially if it occurs toward the end - or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don't mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that's all. ~ Truman Capote

Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence. ~ Anthony Powell

Listen to me, you bastard."
"No," Gabriel said.
This simple response left Ash nonplussed. But fuming.
"I'm listening to exactly one person in this room," Gabriel said evenly. "It isn't you. The lady can speak for herself."
Oh. Penny's heart fluttered in her chest.
If by chance, he did mean to seduce her, repeating that sentence fifty times over might do the trick. ~ Tessa Dare

The answer to all questions of life and death, "the absolute solution" was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language... Thus the traveller spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters. And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality - one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Rosethorn had gone to her room the moment Niko started to cough. Now she returned with her syrup and a firm look in her eye. "I thought you were having trouble last night. Drink this." She poured some into a cup and held it out to him.
Niko looked at it as if she offered him rotten fish. "I am fine. I am per-" He couldn't even finish the sentence for coughing.
"It's not bad," said Tris, crossing her fingers behind her back. "Really, tastes like-like mangoes."
Niko looked at her, then took the cup and downed its contents. The four watched with interest as his cheeks turned pale, then scarlet. "That's terrible (exclamation point)" he cried, his voice a thin squeak.
"Maybe I was thinking of some other syrup," Tris remarked with a straight face. ~ Tamora Pierce

After our clips were seen on YouTube, we gained some fame and were invited to Dubai to kick off a five country tour of the region. This was a big deal because no American-based comedy troupe had ever gone to the Middle East to perform for Middle Eastern people. As a matter of fact, normally whenever Middle Easterners hear the words "American" and "troop" in a sentence, it usually means their country is about to be attacked. So it was important for us to emphasize the word "comedy" when publicizing our Dubai arrival. It was also important for us to spell troupe with a "u". What a difference a vowel makes. ~ Maz Jobrani

I think the rule of thumb should be this: if you preface a sentence about a friend with the phrase, 'I love X, but ... ' more than once in any conversation, you should stop hanging out with them. ~ Sloane Crosley

A 'career woman,'" Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. "A spinster," she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. "Perhaps you will never marry," Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. "Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,'" Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. "It was good enough for Jane Austen. ~ Kate Atkinson

Do you get it now,Becks?" Jack wrapped a finger around a long strand of my hair, and we were quiet as it slipped through his grip.
"You haven't moved on?"
He chuckled. "I have a lifetime of memories made up of chestnut wars and poker games and midnight excursions and Christmas Dances...It's all you. It's only ever been you.I love you." The last part seemed to escape his lips unintentionally, and afterward he closed his eyes and put his head in his hands,as if he had a sudden headache. "I've gotta not say that out loud."
The sight of how messed up he was made me want to wrap my arms around him and fold him into me and cushion him from everything that lay ahead.
Instead,I reached for his hand. Brought it to my lips. Kissed it.
He raised his head and winced. "You shouldn't do that," he said, even though he didn't pull his hand away.
"Why?"
"Because...it'll make everything worse...If you don't feel-"
His voice cut off as I kissed his hand again, pausing with his fingers at my lips. He let out a shaky sigh and his hair flopped forward. Then he looked at my lips for a long moment. "What if...?"
I bit my lower lip. "What?"
"What if we could be like this again?" He leaned in closer with a smile, and as he did,he said, "Are you going to steal my soul?"
"Um...it's not technically your soul that..."
I couldn't finish my sentence. His lips brushed mine, and I felt the whoosh of transferring emotions,but it wasn't as strong as th ~ Brodi Ashton

To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Murder by legal process is immeasurably more dreadful than murder by a brigand. A man who is murdered by brigands is killed at night in a forest or somewhere else, and up to the last moment he still hopes that he will be saved. There have been instances when a man whose throat had already been cut, was still hoping, or running away or begging for his life to be spared. But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away FOR CERTAIN; here you have been sentenced to death, and the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no agony greater than that. Take a soldier and put him in front of a cannon in battle and fire at him and he will still hope, but read the same soldier his death sentence FOR CERTAIN, and he will go mad or burst out crying. Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness? Why this cruel, hideous, unnecessary, and useless mockery? Possibly there are men who have sentences of death read out to them and have been given time to go through this torture, and have then been told, You can go now, you've been reprieved. Such men could perhaps tell us. It was of agony like this and of such horror that Christ spoke. No, you can't treat a mean like that. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you are the intuitive, you need to observe the following rules: First, say explicitly, at the start, what you are talking about. (Otherwise, you are requiring your sensing listeners to hold what you say in mind until they can figure out what you are referring to, which they seldom think is worth doing.) Second, finish your sentences; you know what the rest of the sentence is, but your listeners do not. Third, give notice when changing the subject. And last, don't switch back and forth between subjects. Your listeners cannot see the parentheses. Finish one point and move explicitly to the next. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers

But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply. ~ Henry James

The most magical key for success is this simple sentence: I can do it! Repeat this in your mind! I can do it! I can do it! I can do it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. ~ Truman Capote

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots ... ~ David Lodge

The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence. ~ Byron White

Some poets write pages upon pages because their hearts have a song to sing and their melodies cannot be contained in a single stanza... and I find myself typing out a quote because my soul is still gasping for breath, and all the words form a single sentence: I miss us. ~ Alfa H

I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it ... Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all. ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the other players, and shouting 'Off with his head!' or 'Off with her head!' Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution. ~ Lewis Carroll

Did you have fun with morale when you were in charge?" Wrath muttered to Xcor.
"All the time. The stronger the warrior - "
"The harder the head."
" - the harder the head."
As they finished the sentence with the same words, and in an identically exhausted tone, she was surprised. And yet they had faced the same issues, hadn't they, both leaders of groups of males that were highly charged in the best of situations … and downright dangerous in bad ones. ~ J.R. Ward

In the sentence "She's no longer suffering," to what, to whom does "she" refer? What does that present tense mean? ~ Roland Barthes

When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay. ~ Cassie Nichols

What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time. ~ Etgar Keret

Mack was getting frustrated. He spoke louder, 'But, don't I have a right to ... '
To complete a sentence without being interrupted? Not in reality. But as long as you think you do, you will surely get ticked off when someone cuts you off, even if it is God. ~ Wm. Paul Young

How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. ~ Anne Rice

I have tried to find a configuration of comfort for you. A word, a sentence, a paragraph that would make you feel better, validated, vindicated, justified in your needs and wants. (...) You are not alone in this need for more, or in falling prey to the sway of expectation. Every person the world over has a ideal. These quintessential assumptions affect every relationship we cultivate, be it family, friendships or even romantic bonds. The truth of the matter is that we cannot hold people to our pie-in-the-sky notions. ~ Tamara Thiel

I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet ... that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea ... Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation? ~ Karel Capek

I am to consider the many advantages arising from a frequent use of oaths, curses, and imprecations. In the first place, this genteel accomplishment is a wonderful help to discourse; as it supplies the want of good sense, learning, and eloquence. The illiterate and stupid, by the help of oaths, become orators; and he, whose wretched intellects would not permit him to utter a coherent sentence, by this easy practice, excites the laughter, and fixes the attention, of a brilliant and joyous circle. ~ Mary Collyer

Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. The dead space this process out nicely so that the living hardly even notice they're undergoing the transformation. Unless ~ Caitlin Doughty

As Aunt Naomi was listing all the things she was going to do to help this person, her friend stopped her in mid-sentence. "Naomi, girl," she said, "you need to resign as general manager of the universe. You need to learn that sometimes the best way to help a person is to let them help themselves. Otherwise, they never learn how. And they are always going to make their problems your problems." ~ Patti LaBelle

If I'm a bad person, you don't like me
Well I guess I'll make my own way
It's a circle
A mean cycle
I can't excite you anymore
Where's your gavel? Your jury?
What's my offense this time?
You're not a judge but if you're gonna judge me
Well sentence me to another life

Don't wanna hear your sad songs
I don't wanna feel your pain
When you swear it's all my fault
Cause you know we're not the same (no)
We're not the same (no)
Oh we're not the same
Yeah the friends who stuck together
We wrote our names in blood
But I guess you can't accept that the change is good (hey)
It's good (hey)
It's good

Well you treat me just like another stranger
Well it's nice to meet you sir
I guess I'll go
I best be on my way out
You treat me just like another stranger
Well it's nice to meet you sir
I guess I'll go
I best be on my way out

Ignorance is your new best friend
Ignorance is your new best friend

This is the best thing that could've happened
Any longer and I wouldn't have made it
It's not a war no, it's not a rapture
I'm just a person but you can't take it
The same tricks that, that once fooled me
They won't get you anywhere
I'm not the same kid from your memory
Well now I can fend for myself

Don't wanna hear your sad songs
I don't wanna feel your pain
When you swear i ~ Hayley Williams

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up. ~ Jason Schwartzman

Alright. Well, in all honesty, I don't feel that what I've done is a crime. And I think it's illogical and irresponsible for you to sentence me to prison. Because, when you think about it, what did I really do? I crossed an imaginary line with a bunch of plants. I mean, you say I'm an outlaw, you say I'm a thief, but where's the Christmas dinner for the people on relief? Huh? You say you're looking for someone who's never weak but always strong, to gather flowers constantly whether you are right or wrong, someone to open each and every door, but it ain't me, babe, huh? No, no, no, it ain't me, babe. It ain't me you're looking for, babe. You follow? ~ George

And noticed his eyes, they stayed on me whenever I spoke - almost intimidating in their focus. He was actually listening to me, not just waiting for a chance to speak, his focus one hundred percent on me. It felt odd, a man paying such rapt attention to me, and I tried to remember the last time I had such complete attention, without eyes darting to a phone, or a sentence interrupted, details lost. ~ Alessandra Torre