Beautiful Sentences Quotes & Sayings

I wait for him to announce my presence, holding his gaze, refusing to look away, determined that this beautiful boy see the face he sentences to death with this next words. — Sophie Jordan

One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and ... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph ... and see those sentences rising up ... and ... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that ... ' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence ... to ... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me ... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work. — Gina Berriault

All his elaborated arguments and beautiful sentences turned, under the influence of alcohol, into dust and slipped between his nicotine-stained fingers. — Ole H.

A lot of the time I don't understand what I'm doing here. In life, I mean. I'm not saying that I wish I were dead or anything. Most of the time, I'm glad for the opportunity to be alive. I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to be doing with it. I think my purpose is to be a writer: to craft beautiful sentences that change the way people view the world, to create something meaningful outside of myself. That's what I think a lot of the time. But then sometimes I wonder if I just made that up in order to make myself feel like I have a reason for taking up space. — Leila Sales

I looked into his eyes and then down at his mouth before continuing. "Have you ever noticed how pretty and beautiful words can be? How easy it is to say the things you think someone wants to hear. How you can affect a person's entire day with just a few measly sentences?"My slight smile dropped. "But when you don't follow them up with any action, they're completely pointless. They're just sounds and syllables. But they mean absolutely nothing." My gaze glossed over as my mind wandered. — J. Sterling

But the solution to the riddle of life and space and time lies outside space and time. For, as it should be abundantly clear by now, nothing inside a frame can state, or even ask, anything about that frame. The solution, then, is not the finding of an answer to the riddle of existence, but the realization that there is no riddle. This is the essence of the beautiful, almost Zen Buddhist closing sentences of the Tracticus: "For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist." — Paul Watzlawick

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves ... I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Many of the sisters were Black and poor and from D.C., where every crime is a violation of a federal statute. They were beautiful sisters, serving outrageous sentences for minor offenses. — Assata Shakur

It is hardly fresh intellectual ground that beauty matters, and that it matters more for women. For example, a foundational paper of social psychology is called "What Is Beautiful Is Good." It was the first in a now long line of research to establish that good-looking people are seen as more intelligent, more competent, and more trustworthy than the rest of us. More attractive people get better jobs. They are also acquitted more often in court, and, failing that, they get lighter sentences. — Christian Rudder

With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell. — Michael Connelly

But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?" murmured Kohlrabi.
Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like "epiphany" and "amaranth." Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers ... "
Mosca shrugged.
"He's got a way with words. — Frances Hardinge

Today the tower's flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot's lifted lid. It appeared someone had given the birds new instructions, had whispered that there was something to avoid, or someone to fool. I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he'd woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: "Paranoia is a flower in the brain." Perkus offered this, then smirked and bugged his eyes
the ordinary eye, and the other. I played at amazement (I was amazed, anyway, at the fact that Perkus dreamed sentences to begin with). Yet I hadn't understood what the words meant to him until now, when I knew for a crucial instant that the birds had been directed to deceive me. That was when I saw the brain's flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was. — Jonathan Lethem

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing. — Teju Cole

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice. — Christopher Hitchens

The single most important lesson of effective communication is this: Focus on clarity. Concentrate on precisions. Don't worry about constructing beautiful sentences. Beauty comes from meaning, not language. Accuracy is the most effective style of all. — David Gerrold

I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful. — Rae Hachton

On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles. — Michael Dirda

She was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets. — Pat Conroy

Words are beads on the strings of sentences. So make a beautiful necklace! — Aneta Cruz

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them. — Karen Thompson Walker

Have you ever noticed how pretty and beautiful words can be? How easy it is to say the things you think someone wants to hear. How you can affect a person's entire day with just a few measly sentences? — J. Sterling

True love was a language, so many looks, touches and one word references that told the other more than full sentences of paragraphs, more than full outpourings of speech.
Our language was extensive and beautiful, and over a joyful lifetime together, we stayed fluent in it. — R.K. Lilley

Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her. — Gregory Galloway

When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping ... all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density. — William T. Vollmann

By the time I left to go downtown for supper, I was at the high point just short of where intoxication begins to droop into clumsiness or melancholy; and the minute I was outdoors the streets, in the very beautiful late of afternoon weather, improved, that if it can be improved, with the feeling of being alone for a little while, and with the sharp, tender enjoyment of a city I am ordinarily tired in. — James Agee

Your fine church has not contented itself with cutting off from the Scripture entire books, chapters, sentences and words, but what it has not dared to cut off altogether it has corrupted and violated by its translations. In order that the sectaries of this age may altogether pervert this first and most holy rule of our faith, they have not been satisfied with shortening it or with getting rid of so many beautiful parts, but they have turned and turned it about, each one as he chose, and instead of adjusting their ideas by this rule they have adopted it to the square of their own greater or less sufficiency. — Francis De Sales

More people were in love with her than with any one I've ever known. She had that power - she enjoyed things. She wasn't beautiful, but - I don't know how she did it. She often spoke in broken sentences and seemed very sad. Yet she got on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so amazingly - funny — Virginia Woolf

An Afternoon in the Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move. — William Stafford

Things got out of hand. It happens."
My brows flew up. "It happens? Often? Do you just walk around and happen to end up kissing girls? Do you slip and fall on girls' mouths? If so, that's got to be an awkward life to live."
"Well ... " The quirk to his lips was mischievous and teasing, but I was so not having it. He sighed. "Tess, you're a beautiful girl and I'm a guy and - "
"Oh, shut up."
His eyes widened.
"Don't even finish what will most likely be the lamest sentence in the history of lame sentences. You're attracted to me. — J. Lynn

Some stories aren't meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles. — Caren Gussoff

There was something so unutterably ridiculous about the sight of a US company deleting posts accusing it of censorship that many other people began to protest. — G.R. Reader

It is this that ruins churches, that you do not seek to hear sermons that touch the heart, but sermons that will delight your ears with their intonation and the structure of their phrases, just as if you were listening to singers and lute-players. And we preachers humor your fancies, instead of trying to crush them. We act like a father who gives a sick child a cake or an ice, or something else that is merely nice to eat
just because he asks for it; and takes no pains to give him what is good for him; and then when the doctors blame him says, 'I could not bear to hear my child cry.' ... That is what we do when we elaborate beautiful sentences, fine combinations and harmonies, to please and not to profit, to be admired and not to instruct, to delight and not to touch you, to go away with your applause in our ears, and not to better your conduct. — John Chrysostom