#sentence

...there are just some people you cannot find the good in. But who am I to decide if someone should be killed for murdering a child...instead of for murdering a drug addict during a deal that went bad...or even if we should be killing the inmate himself? I'm not smart enough to be able to say which life is worth more than the other. I don't know if anyone is. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#change

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? ↗

— Lynne Truss

#english-language #grammar #humor #lynne-truss #punctuation

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#music

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. ↗

— Edwin A. Abbott

#nature

From above, start with the privileged view. ↗

— Maureen Howard

#nature

I know what you want to hear, doctor, but I'm sorry, you're not going to pry some sordid confession out of me. ↗

— Bárbara Mujica

#first-sentence

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#first-sentence

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#opening-lines #opening-sentences #walks #first-sentence

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. ↗

— Günter Grass

#first-sentence

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#first-sentence