One Sentence Fall Quotes & Sayings

Armise and I had met through the scope of our rifles and sometimes I wondered if that was also where we'd end. — S.A. McAuley

We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the outdoor standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence, it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall short of Nature's standard in quantity only, not in quality. — Brenda Wineapple

Well, it's more like a sentence on life," he said, grinning. "I live by three rules: Don't dwell on the past, present, or future, party hard, and never fall in love. Easy. — Ada Adams

Do you ever think about him?" Elise asks. "The baby?"
I nod slowly. "I wonder how much would have been different, if he'd-"
"Don't say it." There are tears in her eyes. "Let's do it this way, Charlie, all right? Let's just pick one sentence out of all of the ones we should have said
the best, most important sentence
and let's say just that."
This is my old Elise
whimsical, loopy
the one I couldn't help but fall for. And because I know she is sinking in the quicksand of regret just like me, I nod. "Okay. But I go first." I try to remember what it was like to be loved by someone who did not know limits, and had not yet been ruined by that. "I forgive you," I whisper; a gift.
"Oh, Charlie," Elise says, and she gives me one right back. "She turned out absolutely perfect. — Jodi Picoult

Why is life so much easier to live when people are trying to take it from you than when you're forced to actually live it? — Sebastien De Castell

I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject. — Albert Camus

She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless. — Helen Oyeyemi

That's the spark I've been looking for. The spark is the feeling that you were born to be this happy. And that's how I feel right now. — Gemma Burgess

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you'll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you'll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Arthur Gordon — Arthur Gordon

Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short. — M. Scott Peck

Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath. — Stefan Bachmann

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

I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that's great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn't care less. — William T. Vollmann

interrupted, he would fall silent, then began his sentence again in exactly the same place to tell it in his own way, at his own speed. — Mar Preston

The higher a tree wants to rise, the lower its roots must grow. — Matshona Dhliwayo

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word-tension-has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end-is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be? — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous. — Henry David Thoreau

Diplomacy is unfashionable in the world of knee-jerk reaction and the dogmatic sound bite on television. — Douglas Hurd

Only a few more steps, I kept telling myself, just a few more steps and I--The box slipped out of my grasp. My knees bent as I tried to regain my grip but it was too late. The box full of totally breakable stuff started to fall.
"Son of a bitch-ass, rat bastard, mother fu - "
The box halted suddenly, a foot from the cement, startling me so strongly that my string of curses was cut off. The weight of the heavy box was completely gone, and my obviously weak arm muscles wept with relief. At first I wondered if I'd developed some kind of superpower, but then I saw two very large hands that weren't mine on either side of the box.
"I admire anyone who can successfully use the word 'rat bastard' in a sentence. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life. — Kenneth Clark

I think we've probably all read a word that we've never heard pronounced out loud, and we try it out in a sentence and fall on our face. — Gillian Jacobs

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don't tell it. — Joan Didion

In the world of animals, pain serves an equivocal role. Parental nips and swipes are common tools in upbringing. And socially, pain is sometimes used to maintain hierarchies of dominance. But this animal use of pain seems somewhat restrained, at least in contrast with the human situation. Here the capacity for pain is often used to systematically exploit and oppress at intensities often far beyond those seen in the behaviour of our nearest primate relatives. At the same time, at least in western culture, pain is rarely used for pleasure. Is it little wonder that all pain is viewed as intrinsically evil? Or that the pain-pleasure of leatherspace has been labelled torture? — Geoff Mains

I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.' — Jess Walter

We are developing all sorts of technologies based on what we have learnt from birds, animals and soils. Pollination is worth £billions. But it also highlights how nature is so interconnected. — Tony Juniper

For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all. — Lewis Carroll

What shall I do with all my books?' was the question, and the answer, 'Read them,' sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at the very least handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open as they will. Read on from the first sentence that turns the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition. — Winston S. Churchill

Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear. — Karen Russell

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. — Joan Didion

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them - peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. — William Manchester

I pressed forward, pushing my body along hers, and wrapped my arms around her waist. Some of the intensity of my anger dissipated and drained away. After a very long, steamy kiss, I broke away, breathing hard.
Rimmel's head collapsed against the wall and she stared up at me with unfocused hazel eyes. The flecks of color in the center were green today. "Romeo," she gasped.
I pulled back enough so I could lift her arm and grasp her fingers. She made a sound of protest when I pushed back the material of the shirt once more and stared down at the dark blotches marring her skin.
"How were you going to explain this to me?" I rumbled.
"I wasn't going to lie, it that's what you're implying," she snapped.
"Ah, baby." I groaned and lifted her wrist to press my lips to the marks. "I'm being a jerk."
"You said it ... " She agreed, letting the rest of her sentence fall away.
I smiled against her skin and then kissed her inner wrist once more. — Cambria Hebert

(Take a deep breath for this next run-on sentence) I believe that two people can fall madly in love and sift that fairy-tale feeling up through the raging sands of reality to settle on top as a polished stone of true joy, where the "happily ever after" will be something two mortals are working towards and not a finished product. — Zack Oates

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

The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don't rely on an overarching configuration (don't even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists. If there is a spectrum starting with Macro Planners on one end and Micro Managers on the other, Smith would be somewhere to the right of the page. Smith's writing is entirely incremental and cumulative. The grand plan is that there is no grand plan; working things out ahead of time ruins everything, "feels disastrous."She prefers the writing of a novel as a process of discovery. "The thinking goes on on the page," not beforehand. — Sarah Stodola

There's just the memory of that time he walked in on her while she was dressing, and afterward couldn't string a sentence together.
And not only that, but she hadn't even made fun of him for it. She hadn't! Oh no, why not? Also ... had the sight of her boobs possibly sort of made him fall in love with her? It had to be the boobs. — Charlotte Stein

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