Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences — like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.
--
Karl Shapiro, in "Randall Jarrell" from The Bourgeois Poet (1964)Randall Jarrell
» Randall Jarrell - all quotes »
Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.
Stanley Fish
I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!" and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page. But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have".
Roger Zelazny
After all, a district judge who gives harsh sentences to Yankees fans and lenient sentences to Red Sox fans would not be acting reasonably even if her procedural rulings were impeccable.
John Paul Stevens
Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
Stanley Fish
A few weeks ago I read, in Sacheverell Sitwell, two impressives sentences: “It is my belief that I have informed myself of nearly all works of art in the known world.... I have heard most of the music of the world, and seen nearly all the paintings.” It was hard for me to believe these sentences, but I wanted Sitwell to be able to say them, liked him for having said them—I believed.
Randall Jarrell
Jarrell, Randall
Jarry, Alfred
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