Sentence Form

Famous quotes containing the words sentence and/or form:

    When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
    The only son is dead.

    But the mother needs to be better,
    She with thin form presently drest in black,
    By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
    In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
    O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and
    withdraw,
    To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)