84 Quotes About Sentences

For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something — distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world — but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before.

In days long past, Jarod said he’d write a sentence about my love, translated in Russian, and that sentence, like my love, is clearly not for sale, unlike his virginity, or this book, which I’m both offering at ten times the market value, so hurry up and buy now, before it goes down.

Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.

Each sentence as it is written is written to lead us to a place of silence. The silence that follows each sentence should endure as long as it has taken you to read the sentence. This silence is different from white space. Silence should fill your body, not simply remain on the page. Your body needs to experience the space between. Silence needs to mark you.

You can not control the thought, but you can control the tongue.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

The best sentences are not those that are built from obscure words, but those whose meanings create ripples in our imagination that go beyond the words they contain.

Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.

All forms of creative thinking involve a struggle to conquer or master something, and usually that specific something eludes us completely. A personal essayist struggles to construct paragraphs and sentences to comprehend their authenticity. The essayist also labors to choose the right words that provide the proper degree of nuance to the texturized material. Language, which creates the grainy surface and content of sentences, reveals the pinging of the essayist’s mind at work.