#Structure Quotes

“Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!”

“Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.”

“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.”

“Everybody says they want to be free. Take the train off the tracks and it’s free-but it can’t go anywhere.”

“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.”

“The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.”

“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

“...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.”

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

“What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?”

“If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.”

“For the world was built in order around the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon.”

“To the audience, it's like I'm changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show's almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.”

“A disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house”

“I play better tennis because the court is there.”

“when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are . Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.”

“I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”

“A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.”

“Mission defines strategy, and strategy defines structure.”

“Nonviolence is the rock on which the whole structure of non-co-operation is built.”

“Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.”

“A civilization based on nonviolence must be different from that organized for violence.”

“You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

“Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.”

“The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.”

“Most of my stuff is just a series of false leads. I'll approach a story as a subject and then make a whole bunch of different runs at the lead. They're all good writing but they don't connect. So I end up having to string leads together.”

“Human reason is by nature architectonic.”