Fascinating Quote

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost

He states simply a truth that is often forgotten. It is stylistically a short but clear point upon which he could easily expound and yet is is not needed. Although, I know looking at what has passed before that this is true I can never seem to believe this is current conflicts. I like his idea of limiting the words he uses to tell me what he knows. It can be rather difficult to write an entire concept in just three words and yet he has done just that. I admire this writing style because I am not good at being succinct and he has a firm grasp on brevity.

Reservation at Del Frisco's; Order the Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

"they have bones reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber." - Col. Quarich,  Avatar.

           In the context of style this quote, from much loved film Avatar, is like a high end steak house serving a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese in addition to their thick, juicy, tender, and cooked meats.  The style of the movie Avatar can be generally described as mind blowing, creative, and imaginative.  The style of this description of the made up planet's species is unthoughtful, lazy, and absolutely unimaginative.  It contradicts everything this movie represents with its creative style.  Obviously, I myself cannot say definitively that an alien species would not have bones that are reinforced with a completely unnaturally occurring invention of human beings, however, I can definitely say that using carbon fiber as a natural trait in a completely made up world took no creative effort.  For me, this one single line from this film makes the rest of its mind blowing creativity lose some of its effectiveness.  Similar to the way that food leaves a lingering taste in your mouth after you have eaten it.  Only, I chose to see Avatar so that I could be left with the delicious linger of fresh creativity in my mind.  I was served all the delicious experiences I wanted except for the quick, cheap, and easy Quarter Pounder with Cheese which, for some reason, James Cameron sinfully let sit on the same plate as my fillet.  After hearing this line everything in this film began to taste more like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and less like the fillet I came for.

"I Said Ain't to Make a Point!"

"I said ain't to make a point!" -My Uncle Ron

This phrase interestingly came up in a conversation I was having with my Uncle Ron. The conversation originally began by him telling me that he had to put my grandmother into an assistant living home because her alzheimers was getting bad and it was to hard to deal with on his own. At one point he said, "I ain't dealing with it anymore, I'm tired. And yes, I said ain't to make a point." I was not sure what to say at this point, and for a moment I just thought to myself, "Did he really just say, 'I said ain't to make a point?'" The next thing I know he says that he knows I am an English Major and understands that "ain't" is not politically correct to say, but because he was "making a point" he felt the word "ain't" was sufficient for his word choice.
The reason this phrase stuck out to me so much, is because I found it ironic that we had just had this conversation in class; that because we are English Major students, people tend to feel they have to be politically correct around us because we are preceived as "grammar police." I also found this phrase interesting because I did not understand why he felt he had to use poor grammar (word choice) in order to make a point. There are many other words he could have used that are considered, politically correct, and would have helped him make a profound statement that, he was tired and not going to take care of my grandmother on his own anymore.
My imitation of what my Uncle was trying to do is to say something like: "At my age, I do not have the energy to take care of Grandma anymore, and I refuse to continue to care for her on my own." or "Providing for Grandma is taking a toll on me physically, mentally, and emotionally. I just can't do it anymore." Although this seems a little more wordy than what he originally said, these two imitations would have summed up everything we had talked about and he still would of made a profound statement in the fact that he can no longer provide for my Grandmother anymore.

Missing a Coal

"Ravens kicker says scoreboard error responsible for missed field coal." CBS news

This sentence only has the misspelling of goal into coal wrong with it but even that its a national news outlet. Somebody should have caught this as it stands it sounds as if the writer is talking about something completely different.

Week 2 Blog Post

"Child Brings Pot to School for Snack: Cops" - Bob Connors for nbcconnecticut.com

This phrase caught my eye because I don't understand why the author placed it where it is. Why couldn't the author have written "Cops: Child Brings Pot to School for snack"? Or maybe "Cops Say Child Brought Pot to School for Snack"? Since I saw this byline on Wednesday night, I have seen others like it and I find it a little strange. I also noticed that determiners and auxiliary words are missing, which is understandable because of the need for brevity. My only issue is that the lack of certain words and the "strange" placement of punctuation marks can cause misunderstanding in the audience.
My example of a sentence like this would be "Man Skips Across Street, No Real Reason: Witness".

Absurdist Wisdom for Children (and Adults)

"If night falls
use stars for streetlights."

"If you have butterflies in your stomach
ask them into your heart."

"If there is no happy ending
make one out of cookie dough."

-Cooper Edens, If You're Afraid of the Dark Remember the Night Rainbow

Cooper Edens wrote and illustrated a lovely little picture book filled with life wisdom that is beautifully simple and wonderfully absurd. A page at a time, he addresses common situations and metaphors in our daily lives and presents simple solutions twisted on their heads. The lines and their accompanying illustrations are colorful, whimsical, imaginative, and fun.

My imitation:

If you have writer's block
redraw the lines to make it a cylinder.

...which would be accompanied by a cute illustration of writer a with an over-sized pencil erasing the edges of a cube.

Above all, I think that Cooper is attempting to get his reader to see potentially negative situations in a positive light. No matter what the world throws at you, you can always choose to make the best of it. Life is too short and too silly to take so seriously. Instead of brooding on our troubles, isn't our time better spent making the best out of a situation through ingenuity, imagination, and optimism?

Eazy Duz It

"Don't quote me boy, I ain't said shit" - Eric "Eazy E" Wright
I like this line because it is so often quoted, and it implies a sort of self-important sense that Eazy thinks he is quite quotable. It says, don't quote me because what I say is not important. And others have responded by quoting the very line, numerous times and in a variety of ways, for the last two decades. I always wonder how prescient Eazy E may have been, toying with people by saying something he knew would reverse psychologize everyone and cause the opposite of the request, "don't quote me". Then I remember he was a rapper, that this is a rap song about chillin' in the 'hood, and that Eazy was into a lot of things, likely not including caring about any of this at all. The line might have just come to him as a clever way to complete the hook for the song. Don't quote me on it.

Advice via Tech Comm.

The sentence that captivated me was from my Tech Comm. textbook, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, by Dan M. Brown.

"The moment your challenges change and the tools becomes insufficient for capturing your ideas, drop it and learn something new" (8).

The reason it captivated is because about adaptability, ultimately, and the resolution to the problem of adapting to new circumstances in life that we all have to face would seem to be a complicated one. However, the author's suggestion to solving this problem (though he is only talking about web design, I still thought it was good bit of advice to apply to life) is blunt and simple: Drop it and learn something new.

I think I noticed it and held on to it so much is because at the time I was reading this book, my little brother had come to me asking for advice about women (forever more, hang me). He told me of how his lady friend wasn't impressed with his weekly rose offerings as she used to be. I tried to explain to him that stuff gets old and he has to change it up every once in a while, but he didn't get it. This sentence cleared it all up for him...well, me really because I didn't have to explain it to him anymore.

Imitation: Challenges are everchanging, so the tools you use to meet those challenges are everchanging, requiring you to donate old tools and buy new ones.

I tried to make the sentence more universal and obvious that it was speaking about the challenges in life. I didn't think the bit about "the moment" challenges change was necessary, and I thought the sentence would be dramatical and hooking if it began with "challenges."

Ultimate Dry Humor

From Faust Eric:
"Eric gave the world a critical examination. He wore the expression of someone who knows that all the best gifts in life require the psychic equivalent of two U2* batteries and the shops won't be open until after the holidays" (48).

A lot of the books I have read have been by Terry Pratchett, a wonderful satirist from the UK. Above is something he does a lot in his writing and, I’ve come to realize, is also a staple of British humor. A sort of hyperbolic anti-climax.
 
The situation in which this comes up, a young boy has attempted to summon a demon (following a tangent to the tradition of Faust) to take over the world. After a series of events, he’s given a world, followed soon by the issue, what does one do with the world. In this quote, Pratchett manages to illustrate a very profound series of thoughts to a much more relatable sentiment that is almost elemental in how often it occurs. That with great power comes a great deal of angst that it can’t be used to do the laundry any faster.

*The same size as a D battery in the US.

Jim Butcher

"The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault." Harry Dresden
Blood Rites
Jim Butcher

I love this quote because in a single sentence draws the reader into the novel and if they had not read any of the other ones it sums up the usual problems faced by the character. The sentence is placed perfectly because it is the opening line of the book and has no context pointing to it therefore standing on its own serves as a hook for the book itself. The structure of the sentence is fairly simple with no overt attempts to improve on it and keeps in tone with the story and the established writing style of the character who is supposed to be writing about his own experiences. Highly recommend the books to anyone who is interested in reading.

Zach Schaffer

All hail, Macbeth!

"It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

-William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5

As a playwright and person-who-won't-shut-up-about-theatre-ever, I'll likely be pulling a lot of my sentence examples from play dialog throughout the semester. It seemed appropriate to start with something from a famous classic. Probably one of Shakespeare's most famous lines, and the one that gave William Faulkner a novel title, it's always been one of my favorites.

The poetry of this line has always captivated me. Basically, Mackers is saying that life is nothing but a story filled with rage and expression and passion and emotion, but in the end none of that means anything. Ignoring iambic pentameter for a moment, there are so many ways that this line could have been structured or rewritten to convey the exact same meaning, but without the Bard's touch, it would never be as memorable.

(Horribly Silly) Imitation:

It is a sandwich eaten by an vegetarian, full of empty calories, filling up nothing.

I could have just as easily explained that as someone who doesn't eat meat, I also don't eat a lot of sandwiches (from places like Subway, for example) because bread and lettuce and a small selection of vegetables and cheese is not a highly nutritious or adequately sustaining meal. So, like the idiot's tale, my sandwich has the potential to seem full of many things, but when all is said and done I'll still be hungry in an hour after eating it.

Tim O'Brien

"And the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility."

This is a passage from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Actually, it is not the full sentence. He wrote it to be almost a paragraph long to illustrate the ongoing everyday march of a soldier in the Vietnam war.  To put it all up at once would have been overkill, and I resonated most with the end of it, so the last few lines is what we have here. I love this because he reduces war to a way of walking just as soldiers had to do to survive it. Their dehumanization of the war was their only defense against the horrors they experienced, but, as the author points out, that defense is what allows atrocity to continue unchecked.  

O'Brien's use of diction is what achieves a sense of reduction. The contrast between the word "war" with all of its complex connotation and the words "posture" and "carriage" is huge. By juxtaposing them and saying one is entirely a matter of the other degrades an action taking place on a global scale down to the way one human being carries himself.

I also really enjoy the way this sentence is structured. Beginning with a conjunction still feels like a rebel move to me even though it can grammatically work, and I like that. It grabs my attention. The rhythmic listing between conjunctions or commas is another technique I like, but here it has special significance. The rhythm is like slow trudging steps like the speaker is punctuating each word with a step, and the effect is that these huge concepts like hope and human sensibility diminish into walking again.

Imitation:

And school became entirely a matter of pen moving on paper, the work was everything, a kind of coma, a kind of laziness, a dulled sense of creativity and consciousness and passion and pride and intellectual daring.

Albert Camus

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
This sentence/quote really stuck out to me not only because it's beautiful and simple, but also because Camus manages to convey that any situation can be better when one changes their perspective. Camus uses metaphor twice in the sentence, when he says Autumn is a second spring and also when he says every leaf is a flower. He doesn't go into "why" this is true; he just says it.  Autumn is the time when nature begins to "die", whereas spring is the season wherein nature rebirths itself. The quote also brings to mind that a situation may seem somewhat negative, but could be something else entirely. 
"Love is pain when every hug is a sob." My imitation doesn't work exactly like Camus', but it does use ideas that are somewhat opposite as well as the similar usage of metaphor.

Famous Quote by Galileo Galilei

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." -Galileo Galilei
I was looking for an inspirational quote for the field of teaching. When I found this particular quote it stuck with me and is something that I find to be true.

I like this quote because I am planning on teaching in a classroom someday and I will have to encourage students to strive for exellence and work hard to accomplish their learning goals. This quote is a reminder for me that my students already have the intellect and ability to accomplish anything I ask of them, I just have to encourage and push my students to believe in themselves and "discover" the possibilities of greatness within them. As for the style I like how Galilei is simple and to the point. He does not have to use a lot of words to get his point across and he is able to make a simple statement very profound. -Tiffany K.

An interesting definition

"People ask why some inanimate objects are referred to as "she". Let's put it this way...if said object has the ability to: make you happy, take all your money, and end you (a.k.a. kill, maim, or ruin) it has deserved the right to be called "she". This is the closest definition I have found thus far..." - Cody H.

Cody often makes rather insightful comments and this one makes so much sense I couldn't help but be captivated. He tries very hard to be impersonal until the very end and then connects it back to his life. I don't know why bu while the ellipses drive me crazy I think these sentences wouldn't read in the same way without them. I also like his attempt to define the usage of "she" it's almost like he's creating a grammar rule without meaning to and it seems to be aptly fitting.

William Faulkner - Melissa

"...confusing time with its mathematic progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quiet touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years." -William Faulkner

I love this sentance and its style because not only do these words make an image out of time but they also tell who this image is being seen by, (the old), conveying the elderly's image of time in a way which all readers can invision, understand, and make assumptions about what is being seen, and therefore why it is being seen in such a way. This quote is refering to a character in W.F.'s short story "A Rose For Emily".

First Sentence - RH

"They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there--and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies [sic] false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the times it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end." -Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

I like these three sentences because there are probably more like five or ten sentences there. This style of rambling in presentation of dialogue and narration sums up one reason I love Kerouac and one reason he drives me nuts. When Dean Moriarty speaks, it is often either utterly nonsensical, if not annoying, or quite eloquent and profound (perhaps both). I also like this passage because Dean is telling Sal about the false and fabricated problems that Americans cling to as a sort of odd comforter to get through modern society. Finally, I truly just enjoy the wording and the sound of it; I can picture a pair of "normals" who are trying not to look at the terror that is a sweating Dean Moriarty, mocking them

Introduction

In How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, Stanley Fish confesses to being a sentence-watcher as others are bird-watchers. ENG 350A is a class about sentence watching.