Quotes & Sayings About Run On Sentences

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. — Bill Bryson

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones. — Louis Kronenberger

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself. — Chad Harbach

Did I mention Indian weddings last seven days? There are prison sentences that run shorter than Indian weddings. — Scaachi Koul

She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose.
"I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love. ... "
He did not, however, get his wish. — Erik Larson

Prayer or not, I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to find that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with or just to take a nice silly walk in Central Park with. Somebody who wouldn't judge another for the prepositions they dangle, or their run-on sentences, and who in turn wouldn't be judged for the snobbery of their language etymology inclinations. — Rachel Cohn

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

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall. — Ray Bradbury

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context. — Ellen Klages

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

It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth. — Lester Bangs

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur. — Mary McGrory

My hobbies are run-on sentences. — Adam Sandler

Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in immediate past like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediate past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor. Fleeing together long ago became living together and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past. — Roberto Bolano

When I struggle to get into the game and make an impact: Get backs to set close target and give me something to hit. Call drive so I can get involved. Get in position early, run hard, demand the ball. When ref is being inconsistent with his rulings. Especially when it is eliminating my effect: Be calm when I talk to him. Use right words - Can I speak when you have a moment? Is that the standard for the game? Put pressure on him. Use short sentences which are to the point. When I get taken out trying to get at ball at breakdown: If they are putting one or two on me, must be opportunities for others. Talk to others (8, 12, 13) and get them to do my job. When I get taken out, identify who and why it is working. When I'm planting and not getting shoulders on when tackling: Why? Maybe I'm on the dancefloor too early. Leaving a little later will help. Just keep going, and no worries about being stepped. Big guys coming, get low and use shoulder. Just need to be confident. NO FEAR. — Richie McCaw

I'm trying to untangle the truth from the false from assumptions from the postulations but run-on sentences are twisting around my throat. — Tahereh Mafi

Underneath the moonlight,
we laid and laughed
like run-on sentences, kissed like ellipses, and
you held me so close that I wear my bones down smooth
against
the grain of your skin. — Shinji Moon

I got a call from a mutual friend of ours, Charles King, who's also the executive producer. [Steven Caple Jr and I] had a conversation about it. I read it. We kind of finished each other's sentences when it came to the nuances and personality flaws that the character had, and some stereotypes and things we were trying to stay away from. We agreed on that as well. He just kind of allowed me to run rampant with the ideas. As we paced ourselves through, we developed Turquoise. — Erykah Badu

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots ... you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes - that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity - well, they are the colons and semicolons. — Lynne Truss

Also, he's deathly afraid of hearing something along the lines of "You know, kid, we just had a certain difference of opinion" as the beginning and end of conversation. He's afraid because that's exactly the kind of explanation he usually gets, and it makes him depressed. It interferes with his need to feel grown up. He has all the reasons to be afraid right now. The temptation to get rid of him with a pair of meaningless sentences is overwhelming. The explanations will only invite more questions, and then eventually I will run out of answers. But Smoker is impossible to get rid of. He opens his palm and all of himself is right there on it, and he just hands that to you. You can't throw away this naked soul, pretending like you don't understand what it is you've been offered and why. That's where his power comes from, out of this devastating openness. I've never met anyone like that before. — Mariam Petrosyan

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

I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear. — Stanley Cavell

It's all right when you are calling on a girl or talking with friends after dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, with stops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be the shortest distance possible between periods. — George Horace Lorimer

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

We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are. — Tahereh Mafi