sentence diagram

Then teacher would draw lines that tied various parts of her sentence together, “at the door” descending like a staircase from its noun. This moment made me happy. I was perhaps the only student in the class who relished diagramming; who could while away a happy hour picturing predicates docking at the ports of their subjects like ships. Levels one through six were called grammar schools then, attesting to the importance once placed upon the subject.

—William Gass, “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence,” Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

each word

In a poem, each word has to be right and contribute to the whole; in a story only every sentence. In a novel only every page.

—Alison Laurie, Real People (Penguin, 1978)

form and thought

A discipline in form is a discipline in thought.

—Stanley Fish, How to Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper, 2011)

fulcrum of its own body

Shakespeare’s intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont or Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or a passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.

—S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk (1834)

emotionless sentence

a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

—Gertrude Stein, How to Write