Posts tagged 'Sentences'

"How is it that the god who created love also created dandruff?"

— Swedish film Frolic in the Hay (1956), directed by Sven Ingersoll.

"When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again."

— Character of Sir Thomas More, in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. More says this in response to his daughter’s pleas to him to compromise on his ideals, to save his own life. 

I have already posted a blog on Stanley Fish’s new book on how to read, enjoy and write a “good” sentence.

I finally finished reading the book. Been an edifying experience, to say the least. 

In a chapter, Fish discusses “last sentences” and cites the last sentence from George Elliot’s Middlemarch as an instance of an ending-sentence that marries content with form in an exemplary way:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Why is this sentence exemplary? For this one has to read the book in its totality.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

— Noam Chomsky on how to compose a verbal unit that is grammatically perfect but semantically nonsensical.