#sentence

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody. He was. He was going to shake hands with death. He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been. ("3 Kills For 1") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#death #death-penalty #death-sentence #electric-chair #execution

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. ↗

— Keren Ann

#control #different #different way #even #later

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#deeper #down #integrity #language #matches

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence. ↗

— Isadora Duncan

#art #beautiful #concentrated #effort #enough

Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe. ↗

— Christopher Moore

#humor #humor

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. ↗

— Ronald Harwood

#artist #comma #detail #every #examined

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#death

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. ↗

— James Schuyler

#however #much #poem #prose #reduced

The way you live each day is a sentence in the story of your life. Every day, you make the choice whether the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#each-day #life #sentence #story #experience

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