A Quote by Robert Pinsky
A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.
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I start with voice, maybe a sentence. That sentence might embody an image, and I go from there. One sentence to the next. Sound drives the work these days - sound before description.
Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals.
It's kind of like sentencing. A lot of people say that we have a heavy sentence for this crime and a light sentence for another crime, and what we ought to do is reduce the heavy sentence so it's more in line with the other. Wrong. In most cases we ought to increase the light sentence and make it compatible with the heavy sentence, and be serious about punishment because we are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country.
The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.
What sentence will you choose to impose on yourself? Are you willing to stop suffering and making yourself miserable when your sentence has expired? This would at least be a responsible way to punish yourself because it would be time-limited.
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.
The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.
I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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.
I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.
When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.
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