Tantalizing In A Sentence Quotes

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more. ~ Donald Hall

If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in this era, we might say that the French Revolution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, transformed his very existence and modes of creation. ~ Eric J. Hobsbawm

Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself. One moment he was in his study, seven words into the twenty-fifth sentence of the final chapter of his new book, And the Darkness Rained upon Them, and the next he was dead. A tragic loss, his mind echoed numbly as he slipped away. ~ Derek Landy

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. ~ Ian McEwan

I once knew a fellow who committed robbery with violence, and he was sentenced to a long prison stretch and 12 strokes of the cat. He'd been injured during the robbery, so they put him in hospital to make him better so that they could make him worse. During the administration of the cat, he fainted after six strokes, and the doctor put him in hospital again. And he got very friendly with the nurses and the doctors, and after a while they got him well enough to go back and take the next six strokes. I saw him afterward and I said: "Oh, Jesus - that bloody law, that bloody judge!" But he said: "I don't want the fellow who made the law, and I don't want the fellow who passed the sentence. All I want is the fellow who held the bloody whip. ~ Peter O'Toole

In England on a hot day, women are happy to walk around with their bra straps showing. In Paris, they don't shave their armpits. And you just can't mention Germany and style in the same book, let alone the same sentence. It's the same story in America too, where the Farrah Fawcett haido of 1975 still reigns supreme. In Italy, even the policemenists look like they've just come off a catwalk. One I found, standing on a rostrum in the middle of a Roman square, was immaculate, as was his routine. Each wave of the hand, each toot of the whistle and each twist of the body was Pans People perfect. Never mind that the traffic was completely ignoring him, he looked good, and that's what mattered. Looking good in Italy is even more important than looking where you're going. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

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

Before he can finish that sentence, I have my side dish in my hand, and without a moment's pause for thought I hurl it at his head.

The plate shatters just left of his ear and Harun jerks so hard in his seat he almost topples. He recovers, eyes narrowed. "Do refrain from smashing my crockery, Felicita. With the two of you as my guests, I shall soon have no tables, and then no porcelain."

I'm on my feet, my hands shaking. I can't believe I just threw a plate at Harun's fat head. Or rather, I can believe it. ~ Cat Hellisen

Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn't answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all. ~ Lavie Tidhar

Without (my wife) Laurie, I would never be here right now, I know that. I would either be in a coffin, or stashed away doing a life sentence some place. Or running and hiding some place, if I was still alive. I'm certain I wouldn't be playing music. She's just been perfect for me. And she's a protector also; she protects me from myself, from temptations, and bad associations. She's constantly shielding me from walking the red hot coals of existing as a game. ~ Art Pepper

She walks to a table
She walk to table
She is walking to a table
She walk to table now
What difference does it make
What difference it make
In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought
Language, like woman,
Look best when free, undressed. ~ Wang Ping

It was in the spring that Josephine and I had first loved each other, or, at least, had first come into the full knowledge that we loved. I think that we must have loved each other all our lives, and that each succeeding spring was a word in the revelation of that love, not to be understood until, in the fullness of time, the whole sentence was written out in that most beautiful of all beautiful springs. ~ L.M. Montgomery

The cool thing about being a middle-aged woman is that they asked me if I wanted the security guard inside of the room or outside of the room, and I said, "Outside." And the guard said, "You'll be locked in, there'll be no way for you to get out." And I turned around and there was 21 guys looking at me. There's something about being a middle-aged woman that just totally… I can rock the Auntie Lynda or grandma thing now. [Impersonating an old woman] "Now, you sit down! I don't care about those tattoos! You just sit down." [Laughter.]

I really loved it. These are the people that I would venture to say probably went to public schools, probably went to difficult public schools, and now they're in prison. Their ability to focus and write these stories was amazing; I mean their stories are.… I think the same thing that can get somebody in prison is the same thing that could make them a really good writer. Impulse control. There's no, "Is this a bad convenience store to rob?" [Laughter.] "Is this a bad sentence? ~ Lynda Barry

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

When she stroked her fingertips around the side of it, she received a shock that made her squeak and nearly stumble backward into the fireplace. The chair was occupied.
"Do be careful, Abigail," chided the person sitting cross-legged and contemplative in the wooden seat. "It'd be such a nuisance to have to haul you from the flames and put you out." Silyen Jardine was watching her mildly.
"You nearly gave me a heart attack," she snapped, startled. "What are you doing sitting there - trying it for size?" And if there was a guide titled How Slaves Should Never Address Their Masters, then yes, a sentence like that would be written on page one. Abi began to blurt an apology, but the Young Master waved it away. ~ Vic James

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin. ~ Neil Gaiman

Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage. Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence. ~ Erma Bombeck

Summer Between Terms"

The day's so calm and muggy I sweat tears,
the summer's cloudcap and the summer's heat...
surely good writers write all possible wrong--
are we so conscience-dark and cataract-blind,
we only blame in others what they blame in us?
(The sentence writes we, when charity wants I...)
It takes such painful mellowing to use error...
I have stood too long on a chair or ladder,
branch-lightening forking through my thought and veins--
I cannot hang my heavy picture straight.
I can't see myself...in the cattery,
the tomcats doze till the litters are eatable,
then find their kittens and chew off their breakable heads.
They told us by harshness to win the stars.

Planes, trains, lorries simmer through the garden,
the reviewer sent by God to humble me
ransacking my bags of dust for silver spoons--
he and I go on typing to go on living.
There are ways to live on words in England--
reading for trainfare, my host ruined on wine,
my ear gone bad from clinging to the ropes.
I'd take a lower place, eat my toad hourly;
even big frauds wince at fraudulence,
and squirm from small incisions in the self--
they live on timetable with no time to tell.
I'm sorry, I run with the hares now, not the hounds.
I waste hours writing in and writing out a line,
as if listening to conscience were telling the truth ~ Robert Lowell

Sometimes I think I might have invented you. We're always inventing each other, in a way. We need witnesses. We need witnesses - not many, even just one - to the impossibly long sentence we write with our days. ~ Emily Geminder

I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: "The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits." His point is that when the two seem incompatible, we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us and plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. (Woolf's Darkness) ~ Rebecca Solnit

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The introductory statement for Paul's famous paragraph on marriage in Ephesians is verse 21: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ."1 In English, this is usually rendered as a separate sentence, but that hides from readers an important point that Paul is making. In the Greek text, verse 21 is the last clause in the long previous sentence in which Paul describes several marks of a person who is "filled with the Spirit." The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others. From this Spirit-empowered submission of verse 21, Paul moves to the duties of wives and husbands. ~ Timothy J. Keller

I am in favour of capital punishment if the execution of the sentence is immediate. The purpose of the death penalty is to send out a message to society. ~ Ujjwal Nikam

The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of the faith is being jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity. Let ragamuffins everywhere gather as a confessing Church to cry out in protest. Revoke the licenses of religious leaders who falsify the idea of God. Sentence them to three years in solitude with the Bible as their only companion. ~ Brennan Manning

He waited a few more seconds, hoping her tight jaw would unclench and she'd ask him to stay, but she sat staring down the empty track.
There was nothing for him to do but walk away. The drum of his boot heels as he left Amanda and Lydia behind sounded like the clang of the
door slamming shut on his prison cell in Lexington. Each step away from
them felt like a year added to his sentence.
Spence only walked about a hundred yards before he stopped. His chest ached so much he could hardly draw breath. He couldn't do this.
He looked back over his shoulder at Amanda sitting on the bench. She held Lydia on her lap facing her, resting against her arms and looking up into her face. They were involved in an intimate, one-sided conversation.
He stood and stared. He couldn't leave them, but Amanda had made it clear she didn't want him. God, he would give anything if he could go
back and change the way they'd met. But how could he have done things
differently and still have met Amanda? If he hadn't pretended to be Travis Baxter that day at the station, she never would've spoken to him at all. Spence couldn't regret what he'd done nor could he condone it. It was a double-edged sword. ~ Bonnie Dee

The correct way to punctuate a sentence that states: "Of course it is none of my business, but
" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art. ~ Jodie Foster

A preposition is a word that shows a relationship between its object and another word in the sentence. Examples: By grace are ye saved through faith. (Ephesians 2:8a) These two prepositions introduce phrases that tell us how individuals are saved: By grace and through faith. Both prepositional phrases are used as adverbs because they modify the verb are saved. ~ Shirley M. Forsen

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