Top 1200 One Sentence Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

Work at a place like Google for awhile: if you do an interview and you say all the right things, no one really cares. But the day you say the wrong sentence, it's attributed to 'Senior Google Executive,' and the stock moves, and everybody hates you.

Have you ever thought how one phrase, one sentence, one troll can ruin someone's entire life? Why do we interfere in their private lives? Think of others as our properties? And say whatever bitterness is in our hearts without thinking twice?

The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.

At my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright goodfeeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless--well, finish the sentence for yourself.

I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I will have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.

Oftentimes, a history book in school will talk about the Underground Railroad as if it's one sentence. But thousands of people decided to run, and they single-handedly changed the trajectory of our nation. By running to the North, they put a face to slavery, which recruited a lot of abolitionists.

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.

Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person's life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader's style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.

The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man.

Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Some president wishes to be re-elected, and thereupon speaks about the Bible as "the corner-stone of American Liberty." This sentence is a mouth large enough to swallow any church, and from that time forward the religious people will be citing that remark of the politician to substantiate the inspiration of the Scriptures.

Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.

Nothing is more powerful than allowing yourself to truly be affected by things. Whether it’s a song, a stranger, a mountain, a tea kettle, an article, a sentence, a footstep -feel it all. Look around you. All of this is for you. Take it and have gratitude. Give it and feel love.

No sentence can end with because because, because is a conjunction

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

When you have a full page of well-written dialogue that has a thought process to it, it is pretty easy to memorize. It's a lot easier to memorize than if you're in a scene and other people are talking, and you have maybe one word or one sentence that you have to interject at the right time and in a natural way.

I would be a rich man if I had a quarter for every time one of my Republican colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee utters some variation of the sentence, 'President Obama doesn't have a strategy to defeat ISIS.' It's their calling card on the committee - and on the campaign trail.

I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.

In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.

Never fear Death for you will feel aroused by his sleep. Never cheat death or he will slap you with a sentence of misery for the defeat.

I used to have 20/20 vision, believe it or not; that's gone because of all the reading I did when I wasn't supposed to, reading in the back of a car, waiting for each street light to go past so I could grab another sentence.

Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.

The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Look her in the eyes before you kill her. See her tears, hear her last words. You owe her that much at least." - Eddard Stark

Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I'll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won't even write it down.

She can be Mary Poppins but she can also be - I would never use the word 'crude' in the same sentence as Julie Andrews because she is so fine and beautiful - but she can be naughty and she doesn't mind a good joke.

A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.'

A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity...he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory.

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

There is nothing more satisfying than having a sentence fall into place in a way you feel is right, and then adding another one and then another one. It's extraordinarily satisfying.

Share your story with someone. You never know how one sentence of your life story could inspire someone to rewrite their own.

Well we took it apart scene by scene. We examined every sentence, every full stop, every comma. He has a most wonderful eye for detail, Roman, and you know, he's a very good artist.

?…Abe didn’t say a word. He made straight for his journal and wrote down a single sentence. One that would radically alter the course of his life, and bring a fledgeling nation to the brink of collapse.?I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

Patenting tends to get people's juices flowing when you put the word 'gene' and the word 'patent' in the same sentence. And understandably so. This is stuff we're carrying around - all of us - inside all of our cells. Should somebody be able to lay claim to it?

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done.

but it's not safe and I can feel him slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. "Stay with me." As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back but I don't catch it.

Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.

In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.

You can be predisposed genetically, but it's not a sentence. I'm genetically predisposed, but I manage my weight. The root of obesity, though, is usually emotional. The poor habits are a symptom of a deeper emotional issue.

I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

A woman puts on a new dress eyeliner lip gloss to please others. A woman paints her toes to please herself. And if there was one thing I was familiar with it was pleasing...There's no way to finish that sentence without embarrassing myself.

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner's negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States, 'We are wintering in Worcestershire.' This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire.

I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stonecutter - chipping away at the raw material until it's just right, or as right as you can get it.

Making films can be absolutely fantastic, but it can also be incredibly dull. You spend the whole day sitting by yourself in your trailer and then you get called to deliver one sentence - then you're told to come back and do it again at 5:30 the following morning.