A Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Quote Topics

Breaks Chained Free Free Verse Line Links Sentence Verse

Quote Author

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Writer
Born: 1944

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Jorge Luis Borges

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?

William Zinsser

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.

Rush Limbaugh

The heart of a woman falls back with the night, / And enters some alien cage in its plight, / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

Jodi Picoult

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.

Chang-Rae Lee

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.

William Zinsser

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.

Paul Lisicky

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Marilyn Hacker

I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.

Sheila Heti

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Robert Morgan

If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse."

Shane McCrae

It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.

Joseph Brodsky

A kite can't really fly free,that's just an expression. In order to soar high in the sky the string of a kite needs to be anchored. If the string breaks the kite drops back to the ground. The kite's freedom depends on it not being as free as he thinks it is.

Simon Napier-Bell

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.