First You Write a Sentence. Quotes

“Having only minor gifts has its compensations”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life

“The act is its own reward; do not expect applause. You must be willing to keep writing in the absence of any evidence that anyone is reading. And no use complaining, either, since no one asked you to do it in the first place. The rewards of writing sentences are real, but they are long-deferred and mostly unconfirmed.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life

“To clothe despair in eloquence is to show that it can be endured.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

“But so much writing is just ambient word static, typographic white noise. Picture your sentence up in lights, a stack of words staring straight back at you, demanding thought, and it focuses the mind.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

“In a fast world in pursuit of instant answers, slowness has become a dissident act. Perhaps a sentence slowly written, and slowly relished, could work in the same way, as a last redoubt against the glib articulacy of a distracted age.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

“Sentences are our writing commons, the shared ground where every writer walks.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life

“Poetic emotion, resonance and power is in the vowels/vowel sounds”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life

“Transitive verbs have the most heat because the verb acts on an object. We lit a fire. A notch down the dial come the intransitive verbs, which do not need an object to act on. We met. I sneezed. He flinched. Linking verbs like look, feel and seem have even less heat. To be is the coldest of all.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life

“Speech is more intimate in its syntax than writing. It has shorter clauses and more no-content words to link these clauses up. Writing is denser, with longer clauses and more content words. Speech is simple words in complex sentences; writing is complex words in simple sentences.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life