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Top Good Sentences Quotes

Good Sentences Quotes By John Smyth

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

Good Sentences Quotes By William Shakespeare

It is immensely rewarding to work carefully with Shakespeare's language so that the words, the sentences, the wordplay, and the implied stage action all become clear - as readers for the past four centuries have discovered. It may be more pleasurable to attend a good performance of a play - though not everyone has thought so. But the joy of being able to stage one of Shakespeare's plays in one's imagination, to return to passages that continue to yield further meanings (or further questions) the more one reads them - these are pleasures that, for many, rival (or at least augment) those of the performed text, and certainly make it worth considerable effort to "break the code" of Elizabethan poetic drama and let free the remarkable language that makes up a Shakespeare text. — William Shakespeare

Good Sentences Quotes By L.K. Madigan

The main thing is to WRITE. Some days it might be 2000 words. Some days you might tinker with two sentences until you get them just right. Both days belong in the writing life. Some days you may watch a 'Doctor Who' marathon or become immersed in a book that is so good you can't stop reading. Some days you may be in love or in mourning. Those days belong in the writing life, too. Live them without guilt. — L.K. Madigan

Good Sentences Quotes By Trenton Lee Stewart

If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything. — Trenton Lee Stewart

Good Sentences Quotes By Elizabeth I

I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory. — Elizabeth I

Good Sentences Quotes By Joanna Scott

If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense. — Joanna Scott

Good Sentences Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Sentences Quotes By Brigham Young

Though a man should say but a few words, and his sentences and words be ever so ungrammatical, if he speaks by the power of the Holy Ghost, he will do good. — Brigham Young

Good Sentences Quotes By William James

Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Someone ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever reechoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Someone ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution. — William James

Good Sentences Quotes By Eric Hoffer

Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon. — Eric Hoffer

Good Sentences Quotes By A.W. Tozer

Writers are b*tc*ing about 140 characters. If you can't make a point in two sentences, how good is that book of yours really going to be?
Taken from Twitter Titters Volume 1 edited by John Rice — A.W. Tozer

Good Sentences Quotes By Tom Drury

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable. — Tom Drury

Good Sentences Quotes By Maureen Corrigan

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies. pg. xvi — Maureen Corrigan

Good Sentences Quotes By Amanda Mackey

A great book does not have to be a literary masterpiece with complicated sentences and words no one has heard of. It has to touch it's readers souls and make them feel. Simple words with a story and characters that drizzle over and through you like warm honey and keep you turning the pages can be just as good. — Amanda Mackey

Good Sentences Quotes By Robin Benway

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

Good Sentences Quotes By Marie Wilson

Dorothy Parker once said: I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid." Upon delivering this Dot bon mot, with much waving of sparkly rings and jingly bracelets, Constance Langtry comments that she'd add a fourth: "Deft tongue. And I don't mean a good talker. — Marie Wilson

Good Sentences Quotes By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences ... — Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Good Sentences Quotes By Jesse Kellerman

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences. — Jesse Kellerman

Good Sentences Quotes By Stewart Lee

The world of publishing is in crisis. It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers ... Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." ... and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table ... it was sad". — Stewart Lee

Good Sentences Quotes By Bill Shapiro

So, you wanna know what I want? I want it all. I want to be in love so much it hurts. The frissons. The pin pricks. The mind-blowing sex. The connection. And I want to be married with kids I adore and a husband who makes me feel safe, sexy, smart, secure, silly, serious, salacious, sinful, serene, satisfied. I want someone who makes me laugh until milk comes out of my nose (only I don't drink milk). I want to finish someone's sentences. I want to believe in someone, in something, in a future that's not just about laundry and soccer practice and subdivisions and minivans and guilt-tripping grandparents. I want to make someone a better person. I want to be a good example. I want to love some kids into the world. I want someone who stimulates my brain as much as my body. I want to taste everything and go everywhere. I want to give and I want to get. I want too much and I want it all in one person. — Bill Shapiro

Good Sentences Quotes By Christian Rudder

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

Good Sentences Quotes By William Zinsser

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. — William Zinsser

Good Sentences Quotes By Anne Tyler

Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his sentences with "Frankly,"' and 'Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,' and 'If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you're speaking, not straight into his eyes. — Anne Tyler

Good Sentences Quotes By Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body. — Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Good Sentences Quotes By Maggie Nelson

I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don't think, when I'm writing, "Tell a good story" or "find a meaning." I'm thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get the idea out in language I can bear. I think there's something musical about being impatient with boring sentences - it's not that I don't have boring sentences, God knows I do, but I'm impatient with them. — Maggie Nelson

Good Sentences Quotes By Richard Hugo

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance ( ... ) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection. — Richard Hugo

Good Sentences Quotes By Sarah Dessen

This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don't jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going. — Sarah Dessen

Good Sentences Quotes By John Stuart Mill

My father's moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the Socratici viri; justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labour, regard for the public good; estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion, in contradiction to one of self-indulgent sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern reprobation and contempt. — John Stuart Mill

Good Sentences Quotes By F.W. Bateson

[The] defining characteristics of good prose [are]: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that is relaxed and almost colloquial; a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different etymological and social levels of words; and an insistence on verbal and logical precision. — F.W. Bateson

Good Sentences Quotes By Lois Wyse

Don't ever take advice from anyone who starts a sentence with, 'You may not like me for this, but it's for your own good - ' It never is. — Lois Wyse

Good Sentences Quotes By Rupert Graves

I'm crap at interviews. I'm just not very good at sentences. — Rupert Graves

Good Sentences Quotes By Michael Lewis

Many sentences popped out of Amos's mouth that Redelmeier knew he would forever remember: A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place. Redelmeier — Michael Lewis

Good Sentences Quotes By John Sayles

I've always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they're looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, "Oh, we've already done something just like that." — John Sayles

Good Sentences Quotes By Nicole Krauss

Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love, some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were shredded to pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine's spinning blades. — Nicole Krauss

Good Sentences Quotes By Suzanne Enoch

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

Good Sentences Quotes By Eric Hoffer

If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences. — Eric Hoffer

Good Sentences Quotes By Ioan Gruffudd

People in America and Hollywood are very good at pronouncing my name, to begin with. Socially, they're very adept at listening to somebody's name and repeating it, cleverly in the first couple of sentences so the name sticks to begin with. — Ioan Gruffudd

Good Sentences Quotes By Anne Brandt

A 16-year-old was brought to me by her parents. I would like to call her Eva. Her gait was teetering, she was tall, very slim and finely built. She sat down and unwaveringly looked at her parents; she did not make any contact with me. She had noticeably vigorous hair and during examination it transpired that she had a very tense abdomen which hurt with pressure. Her parents reported that she had walked at ten months but hadn't crawled. Speech development occurred very quickly, and she could straight away speak perfectly in full sentences. Eva had trouble with toilet training. For a long time she suffered from extreme constipation. When asked about Eva's eating behaviour, her parents initially said that it was good. — Anne Brandt

Good Sentences Quotes By Jason Guriel

Reviews and essays that call attention to the critic are kind of like those movies that insist the viewer wear 3-D glasses. They promise depth, middle distance, a more fulsome experience, three-dimensionality: some additional layer of life. But the promise is redundant. Good criticism, like good films, will always give the impression of depth, of a presiding, trustworthy personality. Smart sentences, one after the other, are usually heartbeat enough. — Jason Guriel

Good Sentences Quotes By Julian Young

He sank more and more into apathy; little interested him apart from dolls and other children's toys. He still spoke occasionally, but mainly to produce stock sentences in the style of a brainwashed schoolboy. Franziska made a record of some of them: 'I translated much'. 'I lived in a good place called Naumburg'. 'I swam in the Saale'. 'I was very fine because I lived in a fine house'. 'I love Bismarck'. 'I don't like Friedrich Nietzsche'. It would be a mercy to think that he experienced at least a kind of vegetative contentment, but this seems not to have been the case. He suffered from his life-long curse of insomnia, and visitors downstairs were often disturbed by groans and howls coming from the upstairs bedroom. Towards the end of Franziska recorded him uttering 'More light!' (Goethe's dying words) and 'In short, dead!' suggesting that that is what he wanted to be. — Julian Young

Good Sentences Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech. — Christopher Hitchens

Good Sentences Quotes By Elizabeth Gaskell

See, Mary, how a good, innocent life makes friends all around. Confound it! I could make a good lesson out of it if I were a parson; but, as it is, I can't get a tail to my sentences - only I'm sure you feel what I want to say. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Good Sentences Quotes By Steven Millhauser

I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough. — Steven Millhauser

Good Sentences Quotes By Miguel Gomes

I think that I prefer to shoot characters even if they are not good people. I don't think that cinema is a place where you can do sentences like in a court. — Miguel Gomes

Good Sentences Quotes By Teju Cole

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

Good Sentences Quotes By Lynda Barry

If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters. — Lynda Barry

Good Sentences Quotes By Eliza Parsons

He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures: - - but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm. — Eliza Parsons

Good Sentences Quotes By Gregory Day

To me reading is an almost sacred activity and the great novel is its high mass.

The novel is so deeply powerful as an art form because of the investment of time and faith it demands.

A good novel can sweep you up, quarry you out, illuminate you and truly inhabit your life.

And, of course, although the writer composes the sentences of the novel the reader is a full participant in the imaginative process and far from a mere voyeur. — Gregory Day

Good Sentences Quotes By Steven Pinker

the difficulty of a sentence depends not just on its word count but on its geometry. Good writers often use very long sentences, and they garnish them with words that are, strictly speaking, needless. But they get away with it by arranging the words so that a reader can absorb them a phrase at a time, each phrase conveying a chunk of conceptual structure. — Steven Pinker

Good Sentences Quotes By Amy Bloom

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting. — Amy Bloom

Good Sentences Quotes By Marcel Duchamp

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good - I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other. — Marcel Duchamp

Good Sentences Quotes By Larry McMurtry

Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all. — Larry McMurtry

Good Sentences Quotes By Anthony Bourdain

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books. — Anthony Bourdain

Good Sentences Quotes By James Patterson

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them. — James Patterson

Good Sentences Quotes By Jeffrey Steingarten

As a leftover sixties liberal, I believe that the long arm and beady eyes of the government have no place in our bedrooms, our kitchens, or the backseats of our parked cars. But I also feel that the immediate appointment of a Special Pastry Prosecutor would do much more good than harm. We know the free market has totally failed when 89 percent of all the tart pastry, chocolate-chip cookies, and tuiles in America are far less delicious than they would be if bakers simply followed a few readily available recipes. What we need is a system of graduated fines and perhaps short jail sentences to discourage the production of totally depressing baked goods. Maybe a period of unpleasant and tedious community service could be substituted for jail time. — Jeffrey Steingarten

Good Sentences Quotes By David Bowker

Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus. — David Bowker

Good Sentences Quotes By Holly Black

When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name. — Holly Black

Good Sentences Quotes By Neil Gaiman

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

Good Sentences Quotes By Jane Kenyon

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours. — Jane Kenyon

Good Sentences Quotes By Jonathan Franzen

Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself. — Jonathan Franzen

Good Sentences Quotes By Julia Quinn

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

Good Sentences Quotes By Milorad Pavic

It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,' he answered. 'I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge. Therein lies the secret. The better the porridge, the better the painting, but you cannot make good porridge from bad buckwheat. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing.'
He took blue and red and placed them next to each other, painting the eyes of an angel. And I saw the angel's eyes turn violet.
'I work with something like a dictionary of colors,' Nikon added, 'and from it the observer composes sentences and books, in other words, images. You could do the same with writing. Why shouldn't someone create a dictionary of words that make up one book and let the reader himself assemble the words into a whole? — Milorad Pavic

Good Sentences Quotes By Karl Ove Knausgard

You don't think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It's the same kind of feeling. I'm just in it. It's not the words, it's not the sentences, I'm not aware of it. Then it's good. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Good Sentences Quotes By Maureen Corrigan

What we readers do each time we open a book is to set up on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies. — Maureen Corrigan

Good Sentences Quotes By John Chrysostom

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

Good Sentences Quotes By Sylvia Plath

God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am. — Sylvia Plath

Good Sentences Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Sentences Quotes By Zadie Smith

Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page. — Zadie Smith

Good Sentences Quotes By Ralph Fletcher

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do. — Ralph Fletcher

Good Sentences Quotes By John P. Kotter

Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way. — John P. Kotter

Good Sentences Quotes By Catherine Reef

Pride and Prejudice opens with one of the most famous sentences ever written: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." With these words, Jane Austen announced to her readers that they were about to meet such a man and the people eager to marry him off. What was more, they were going to have fun. The dark cynicism of Sense and Sensibility was largely gone, blown away by a clean, fresh wind. — Catherine Reef

Good Sentences Quotes By Osamu Dazai

Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God ... salvation ... love ... light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they're all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime? — Osamu Dazai

Good Sentences Quotes By Adam Ross

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work. — Adam Ross

Good Sentences Quotes By Jesse Andrews

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:
The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.
Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right? — Jesse Andrews

Good Sentences Quotes By Michelle Alexander

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. — Michelle Alexander

Good Sentences Quotes By Ellery Queen

The place smelled male, not the metal-and-soap maleness of a locker room nor the malt-and-sawdust maleness of an old-time corner saloon, but the leather-and-oiled-wood maleness of a city club, as finished and self-consistent as the ash of a fine cigar. At sight of the skirted figure stalking him, the sole visible attendant took refuge behind a showcase; surely a giraffe, were it a male one, would have startled him less. — Ellery Queen

Good Sentences Quotes By Paul Auster

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up. — Paul Auster

Good Sentences Quotes By Norman Lock

{Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own. — Norman Lock

Good Sentences Quotes By Karen Thompson Walker

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us. — Karen Thompson Walker

Good Sentences Quotes By Michael Ondaatje

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history. — Michael Ondaatje

Good Sentences Quotes By Thomas Roma

The question is not whether a picture is good, in some formal, technical sense, but, does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices. — Thomas Roma

Good Sentences Quotes By Richard Mitchell

People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought. — Richard Mitchell

Good Sentences Quotes By Cassandra Clare

No good sentences ever include the word 'should.' I should have paid the tavern bill; now they're coming to break my legs. I should never have run off with my best friend's wife; now she devils me constantly. I should - — Cassandra Clare

Good Sentences Quotes By Daniel Kahneman

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion. — Daniel Kahneman

Good Sentences Quotes By Sylvia Plath

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentencesSylvia Plath

Good Sentences Quotes By Joseph Harold Bunting

I think you can read a dozen different books and not learn a single thing about writing. Good writers don't read, they study books. They pick the plots apart and the sentences apart. And part of studying is copying. Reading is great and every writer should read, but reading alone isn't enough to learn what you need to learn... — Joseph Harold Bunting