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Paragraph Quotes

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Paragraph Quotes

“The darkness is expanding—sixty days of night looming on the horizon—so I step out onto my porch and take a deep breath, the cold air burning my nostrils and making my lungs ache. There is so much to do, so much pain to repurpose into the void. I rub my hands together to warm them, already dressed in layers—long thermal underwear over boxers, two pairs of wool socks—with more to come. The morning is brisk, hoarfrost sparkling across the snow-covered ground, but I know I can’t stand here for long. I inhale again—juniper, salt, a whiff of fish, my own musk—and take in my humble abode, knowing that the season is upon us, preparing for what will come. It is both invigorating and daunting at the same time. (Opening paragraph, first chapter.)”

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Book:Incarnate: A Novel
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“All at once I remember Ylajali. That I could have forgotten her so completely all evening! A feint light penetrates my mind again, a tiny ray of sun, making me feel wonderfully warm. And the sunlight increases, a mild delicate silken light that brushes me in such a soothing delicious way. The sun grows stronger and stronger, scorching my temples and seething white-hot and heavy in my emaciated brain. In the end a mad fire of sunbeams blazes before my eyes, a heaven and earth set on fire, human and animals of fire, mountains of fire, devils of fire, an abyss, a desert, a whole world on fire, a raging Judgement Day. And I saw and heard no more...”

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Book:Hunger
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“When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.”

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Author:Tea Obreht
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“We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.”

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Author:Ali Smith
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“It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.”

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Author:Martin Amis
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“You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.”

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Author:Anne Bernays
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“To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.”

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Book:The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti: 1936-1944, The mirror of relationship
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“There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.”

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Book:Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
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“Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.”

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Book:Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals
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“It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.”

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Book:The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings
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“I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.”

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Author:William Styron
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“If we have dwelled on Godel's work at some length, is it because we see it in the mathematical analogy of what we would call the the ultimate paradox of man's existence. Man is ultimately subject and object of his quest. While the question whether the mind can be considered to be anything like a formalized system, as defined in the preceding paragraph, is probably unanswerable, his quest for an understanding of the meaning of his existence is an attempt at formalization.”

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Author:Paul Watzlawick
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“One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph... and see those sentences rising up... and... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that....' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence... to... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me.... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work.”

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Author:Gina Berriault
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“there are people who are born superficial ... They prefer not to have to deal with more than a limited number of oversimplified ideas - they prefer the book reviews to the books, the headlines and the leading paragraph to the full report, the generalization to the facts, and the negative to the positive.”

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Book:Earth and High Heaven
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“I used to do miserably in English literature, which I thought was a sign of moral turpitude. As I look back on it, I think it was rather to my credit. The notion of actually putting writers' words into other words is quite ridiculous because why bother if writers mean what they mean, and if they don't, why read them? There is, I suppose, a case for studying literary works in depth, but I don't quite know what 'in depth' means unless you read a paragraph over and over again.”

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Author:Patricia Wentworth
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