Guilford College Writing Manual

Television has become a vast electronic desert dotted only by a tiny, occasional oasis.

Birmingham lighted a runaway fuse, and as fast as the headlines could record them, demonstrations exploded all over the country

He had a posture like a question mark.

Her prose is like a well-tended garden.

Give us this day our daily bread.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

--Winston Churchill

Capital has learned to sit down and talk with labor.

--George Meany

If we don't hang together, we'll hang separately.

--Benjamin Franklin

Your argument is sound, nothing but sound.

Elvis Presley sideburns.

She may not have been a Penelope.

They do not escape Jim Crow; they merely encounter another, not less deadly variety.

--James Baldwin

The ground thirsts for rain.

Mother Tongue is a self-reliant female.

. . . the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window panes.

--T.S. Eliot

Her eloquence splits rocks.

I can't move: my left leg weighs three tons.

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance.

--Jonathan Swift

It isn't very serious. I have this tiny, little tumor on the brain.

--J.D. Salinger

How can the poor feel they have a stake in a system which says that the rich may have due process but the poor may not?

By spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench lice, mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud, and gangrene, might be his.

--Thomas Wolfe

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far.

--G.K. Chesterton

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.

--Francis Thompson

idle trade, sweet pain of love, thunderous silence, make haste slowly, luxurious poverty, cold fire