#sentences

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! ↗

— William James

#anything #believes #cheap #discourse #faith

Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one. ↗

— Herbert Bayard Swope

#eye #first #forget #give #last

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing. ↗

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

#his #man #originality #seen #sentences

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do. ↗

— Peter Straub

#henry #henry james #i #i write #james

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

I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. ↗

— Nick Cave

#opening-lines #opening-sentences #death

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

It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth. ↗

— Lester Bangs

#run-on-sentences #music

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