“... a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the lava flow of sentence into sentence that I need.”

“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. ”

“That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.”

“So that was the end of that marriage.”

“And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind’s ear, “…quite enough for everybody at present,” she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…”