#sentences

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. ↗

— William Strunk, Jr.

#drawing #lines #machine #paragraph #parts

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself. ↗

— Theodore Sturgeon

#each #focused #itself #scene #sentences

What else exhausts like sustained deception? ↗

— Leif Enger

#deception

Awakened by a thousand dogs, a passing truck, the tailspin of a poisoned mosquito (or, perhaps, merely the silence of my dreams), I had, before remembering who and where I was, seen only that green sun suspended in the firmament of my room (her uterus bottled in preserving fluids) and, through seconds that became millennia, millennia aeons, felt the steadfastness of my orbit around that cold glow of love, a marvelous fatal steadfastness, before my pupils dilated and shadows and unease once more defined reality, the steel box naked but for a mattress and insomnious bugs where I had lived, in a coma of heartbreak and drunkenness, the six months since Primavera's death. ↗

— Richard Calder

#death

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

— Charlotte Brontë

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

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#first-sentence

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause. ↗

— Jack Henry Abbott

#contracted #effect #i #illness #institutions

All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. ↗

— Charles A. Beard

#dark #destroy #enough #exceedingly #fertilizes

I sum up the prospects for 1967 in three short sentences. We are back on course. The ship is picking up speed. The economy is moving. Every seaman knows the command at such a moment: 'steady as she goes'. ↗

— James Callaghan

#command #course #economy #every #goes

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind. ↗

— Wolcott Gibbs

#mind #ran #sentences #until