Complete Sentences Quotes & Sayings

Poetry is a story
that is so good,
It doesn't need
complete sentences. — John Smyth

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act. — Barbara Hall

Use your dictionary to find the meaning of the new vocabulary words needed for this exercise before you begin. Write the words in your language in the space provided. Complete the following sentences using the correct form of the verb to be. 1. My aunt nice. 2. The clouds white. 3. Kathy sick. 4. The ribbons yellow. 5. We twins. 6. The windows open. — Julie Lachance

They don't have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there's a class of people who get very worked up about such things - they're lonely people - they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts - they'll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them. — Mark Forsyth

I was 40 before I learned that 'No' was a complete sentence. — Kathy Ireland

Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything? — Kurt Vonnegut

I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences. — Gary Soto

The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other. — Brenda Hillman

I nodded. "Where's your hunter?"
She flinched. "He went home. We thought it would be best."
Her eyes went from worried to warning. "He's under Drake protection."
"So am I, or so I've been led to understand."
"Of course you are," Lucy said, her nose pressed to the window. "Misunderstanding. No big deal."
Solange quirked a half smile. "You might try complete sentences, Lucy."
"Can't. Busy."
I was curious despite myself. "What are you doing?"
"Drooling," Solange explained fondly. — Alyxandra Harvey

Don't U want someone to complete you the way Mini-Me completed Dr. Evil? Someone who shares the same tastes in music food who will finish
... my sentences? The last thing I need is someone stealing the punch lines to all my jokes. — Teresa Medeiros

One's complete sentences are attempts, as often as not, to complete an incomplete self with words. — William H. Macy

I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period). — Sarah Vowell

What about James?"
"James? James, the guy I work with? James who takes ice cream scooping more seriously than anyone should? James who almost had a nervous breakdown when the chocolate and rainbow sprinkles accidentally got mixed together? That James?"
"He has a good work ethic. And he's cute."
"Hello, I'm not thirty. I don't want a good work ethic yet. I just want someone who can form complete sentences. — Robin Benway

Despite what you may have learned last month, sustained writing is best accomplished as part of a balanced lifestyle, one that includes things like grocery shopping and speaking in complete sentences with your significant other. No — Chris Baty

For me, the big chore is always the same: how to begin a sentence, how to continue it, how to complete it. — Claude Simon

I let my face go blank and nodded slowly. "Yes.The trolls.Back. With me. Cannot form. Complete sentences." I shook my head. "Yeah,so not happening."
He considered me,annoyed and at a loss for what to do next."I don't kill humans."
"Me niether!See,common ground already. — Kiersten White

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra - they'll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style. — Zadie Smith

Some BuzzFeed articles are written by smart people who use complete sentences. Some of the disposable lists are witty and appear to have taken some effort to put together. — Alex Pareene

Not that I mind this in the least," he said quietly, reluctant to give up the intimacy but worried enough that he had to ask, "but is something troubling you, Sam?"
Her breath caught, then began again. Slowly she nodded against his chest. Christ.
Okay, it was bad. Calculating how hard he should push and how she would react, he decided to cajole her into talking. "You're not sick, are you?"
"No," she said, her voice muffled against his shirt.
So far, so good. "I'm not sick, am I?"
"No."
"No one's died?"
"No. No one at all."
Nearly complete sentences now. That seemed like an improvement. Keeping his voice calm and quiet and the questions over the top and nonthreatening, he kept talking. "You haven't stolen anything that will force you to flee the country? — Suzanne Enoch

I've
enjoyed our conversation, knight. It's been nice talking to someone
who can - "
"Create full and complete sentences?"
That grin returned and, for a moment, his heart actually stopped
beating. "No, it was nice to finally meet someone whose arrogance is
only rivaled by the arrogance of the gods. — G.A. Aiken

I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers - I didn't get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say. — Alice McDermott

There," she said triumphantly. "Like that."
He began to wonder if they were speaking the same language.
"Like what?"
"That! What you just said."
He crossed his arms. It seemed the only acceptable reply. If she
couldn't speak in complete sentences, he saw no reason why he
had to speak at all. — Julia Quinn

Headlines don't have to
be complete sentences, nor do they have to be punctuated unless they are. — Thomas Bivins

Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood. — Erma Bombeck

Way before puberty, before the journal, before the formulation of my life's mission, when I must have been eight or younger, I had a rule: "Think in complete sentences." No giving way to inner screams or sobs - just keep stringing out words in grammatical order. This was a way to keep from going under — Barbara Ehrenreich

Because she can construct and verbally repeat full and complete sentences? — G.A. Aiken

I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that. — Dan Alatorre

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone. — Anna Quindlen

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. — Pico Iyer

Lucy said, her nose pressed to the window. "Misunderstanding. No big deal."
Solange quirked a half smile. "You might try complete sentences, Lucy."
"Can't. Busy."
I was curious despite myself. "What are you doing?"
"Drooling," Solange explained fondly.
"I totally am," Lucy admitted, unrepentant. "Just look at them."
Lucy moved over to give me space. She was watching five of the seven Drake boys repairing the outside wall of the farmhouse, under our window. — Alyxandra Harvey

My favorite "trick" is to stop writing at a point where I know that I can pick up easily the next day. I'll stop in mid-paragraph, often in midsentence. It makes getting out of bed so much easier, because I know that all I'll have to do to be productive is complete the sentence. And by then I'll be seated at my desk, coffee and Oreo cookie at hand, the morning's inertia overcome. There's an added advantage: The human brain hates incomplete sentences. All night my mind will have secretly worked on the passage and likely mapped out the remainder of the page, even the chapter, while simultaneously sending me on a dinner date with Cate Blanchett. — Erik Larson

All systems of morality are fine. The Gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few commonplace sentences put in bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Hyacinth," Lady Bridgerton said in a vaguely disapproving voice, "do try to speak in complete sentences."
Hyacinth looked at her mother with a surprised expression. "Biscuits. Are. Good." She cocked her head to the side. "Noun. Verb. Adjective."
"Hyacinth."
"Noun. Verb. Adjective." Colin said, wiping a crumb from his grinning face. "Sentence. Is. Correct. — Julia Quinn

I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien's words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight. — Neil Gaiman

You don't hunt something that you can live with, you idiot. You can't have a challenge for a lifetime, it'll drain you out. You'll be dead before you even know it. Someone you go all those miles for, someone you change your own skin for, someone you take pride in having managed to impress; is most probably someone you don't live with. People you can live with are ones who complete your sentences, ones who are too comforting, ones who don't really urge you to fall off cliffs for them, rather cheer you on by their mere presence; ones who you can exercise silence with, free and unguarded silence. — Ibraheem Hamdi

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules." — Stephen King

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep
all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. — Aravind Adiga

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. — Ben Gibbard

They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation. — Ayn Rand

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