Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Sentence Quotes from famous persons: Lionel Trilling, Ron Conway, Karen Thompson Walker, Jason Calacanis, Richard Cecil. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Sentence Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.
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I wish I could undo what I did at Enron but I can’t. I understand that I deserve punishment. Your honor, I accept the prison sentence that you are about to impose and will serve it without bitterness.
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I have said with as much sincerity as I can muster that if I were thrown into a dungeon with a sentence of one hundred years, with my only company being an illiterate guard who came twice a day with meals but who never spoke, I would still write – on coarse toilet paper in the dark if I could spare it.
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President Obama should pardon Leonard Peltier, or at least commute his sentence, not just for humanitarian reasons, but also as a way of acknowledging the injustice suffered by Native Americans.
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I usually give a book 40 pages. If it doesn’t grab me by then, adios. With young adult books, you can usually tell by Page 4 if it’s worth the time. The author establishes the conflict early, sometimes in the first sentence. The themes of hope, family, friendship and overcoming hardship appeal to most everyone.
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My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That’s hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.
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This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be.
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You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
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This sentence contradicts itself – no actually it doesn’t.
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I don’t have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.
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What was interesting about grunge was that it was this death sentence to the rock that had preceded it, which was hair metal.
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Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that’s the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.
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The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence.
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Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can’t find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else.
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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.
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To wrap up the idea of ‘Parade‘s End’ in a sentence or two, I would say it’s a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what’s attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him.
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Chris Matthews can’t start any sentence without ‘Let me ask you this… ‘ And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who’s stopping you? Just say it!
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You don’t want another Enron? Here’s your law: If a company, can’t explain, in one sentence, what it does… it’s illegal.
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An understanding of Sor Juana’s work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.
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If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
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I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.
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There’s never been a time in my life where you had the names the United States and political uncertainty in the same sentence.
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My grandfather used to write one sentence every day in his journal: ‘I love Anne more than ever today.’ I think that was his meditation – keeping him in his marriage, and also his appreciation for it. It was very touching.
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I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.
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The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it’s very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
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I think the rule of thumb should be this: if you preface a sentence about a friend with the phrase, ‘I love X, but… ‘ more than once in any conversation, you should stop hanging out with them.
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These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.
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Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence – one at a time.
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‘I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.’ I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person.
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Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
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A series of small but real accomplishments gives people the energy and confidence to continue. For instance, a person who wants to write a novel might resolve to write one sentence each day. Or a person who wants to start running might resolve to run for one minute.
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It’s not as if I’ve ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I’ve got is knowing people who have been in jail – after all, I was a member of Parliament – and visiting them there during their sentence.
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Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie – ‘Casablanca,’ say – and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
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The first sentence of a book is a promise.
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I think a novelist must be more tender with living or ‘real’ people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.
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Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.
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Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
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I struggled tremendously with anxiety and depression related in part to my sexuality and growing up in a time when to be gay felt to me like a death sentence.
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As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you’ve got it right.
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I’m a ‘frotteur,’ someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing.
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I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.
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The sentence imposed on Abdul Kadir sends a powerful and clear message. We will bring to justice those who plot to attack the United States of America.
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What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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I’d given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence – that’s as close to godliness as I can get.
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There’s a reason that students don’t grade their own papers. There’s a reason defendants don’t sentence themselves. And there’s the reason the State Department doesn’t get to investigate itself, determine whether or not it made errors in Benghazi. That is Congress‘s job.
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His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
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There are still parts of the country where it’s hard: when you realize you’re gay, it’s like a death sentence.
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In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I’m thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I’ve come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes.
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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.
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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.
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I’m open to reading almost anything – fiction, nonfiction – as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
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If a guy has served time and served his sentence, he deserves the right to gainful employment, but he does not deserve the right to be put at the front of the list.
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I’ve been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
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One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
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I’m no lyrical stylist; you wouldn’t pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn’t describe my novels as intellectual.
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And I don’t want to begin something, I don’t want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it’s my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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We are all serving a life sentence, and good behavior is our only hope for a pardon.
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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.
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When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
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If you are moneyed or educated, you will get a different sentence than someone who is not.
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One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson‘s investment theory of politics, as he calls it – very outstanding political economist – which essentially – I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.
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When I go about my own politics, I meet Tea Party supporters who I can work with in Congress, that I find common ground with. I find Tea Party supporters who won’t let me get a sentence out without judging me. To say that there is a ‘Tea Party supporter‘ is a gross generality.
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Nothing feels better than constructing a beautiful sentence.
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I like to start every sentence with: ‘So here’s the deal.’
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Secondly, love and relationships are complicated. No one could ever get it right in a four-line sentence.
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I was brought up in a family of leaders, and I think leadership is a life sentence. I like changing things that will shape the future.
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I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.
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Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn’t everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?
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There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I’m alone and trying to solve a sentence. It’s exciting, even when it’s frustrating, even when I can’t do it right.
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A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing.
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The original ‘Hobbit‘ was never intended to have a sequel – Bilbo ‘remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long’: a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.
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Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
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Regrettably, the media are seemingly incapable of mentioning the words ‘compassion‘ and ‘Trump’ in the same sentence.
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The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: ‘The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.
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You got to be careful mentioning people as great as Clint Eastwood. You can’t put me in the same sentence as that man.
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When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called ‘the writing game’ with our father. My brother and I would play it – where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.
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Republicans aren’t interested in a one-sentence fix unless that sentence is, ‘Obamacare is repealed.’
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I’m drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words ‘divine love’ and ‘impeachment‘ in the first sentence. But I know the word ‘divine’ makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
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I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.
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My mother thought me being gay was a death sentence.
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Stammering is different than stuttering. Stutterers have trouble with the letters, while stammerers trip over entire parts of a sentence. We stammerers generally think of ourselves as very bright.
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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.
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I’m not a booky actor, I don’t go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I’m more interested in what the people we’re portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.
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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.
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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.
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People think my name is Morpheus. Many times, people will say to me, ‘Morpheus!’ and I will complete the sentence by saying, ‘is not my name!’
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The script of ‘Shogun’ was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn’t take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.
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As a player you get to meet Hall of Fame members and now to have my name in the same sentence makes me speechless.
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Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It’s the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing ‘four years later’, but you can shift time in a sentence or two.
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People don’t think I can construct a sentence, let alone write a script.
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Prosecutors frequently overcharge, load up charges on individual defendants, knowing that three strikes laws and harsh mandatory minimum sentences will force people to plea bargain and essentially convict themselves because they’re terrified of doing a life sentence for a relatively minor crime.
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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.
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I think, in terms of looking at the trajectory and being around some of the same people, it’s certainly flattering words, but I definitely have not done enough to be mentioned in the same sentence as Coach Payton.
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You don’t need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller – as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.
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Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
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I’d be honored to be in the same sentence as Tom Hardy. I’ve been a twin since the day I was born – fraternal, but we look a lot alike – so I’ve already been mixed up with another man my entire life.
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Of course I would have preferred to win in the Supreme Court as personal vindication and to vacate my sentence.
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For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.
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I tell myself, ‘You’re great, you’re powerful, you’re strong. You’re the greatest, most powerful, strongest fighter in the world.’ I acknowledge my greatness. I bow down before my greatness. I inflate myself like that, and then I pop the balloon in a single sentence by saying: You can be beaten.
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In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
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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.
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Writers are in control of editing processes – making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
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If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
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I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.
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Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
