ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Opening with a quotation

Opening an entire piece with a quotation sets the tone for all that follows.

"It is my duty," wrote the correspondent for The Times of London at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, "to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how I felt in the summer of 1979 when I arrived in Cambodia.

"The source of my painting is the unconscious," Pollock declared, and there was no Abstract Expressionist of whom this was more clearly true.

"I think it of great importance," wrote Gouverneur Morris to George Washington in 1790, advising him on how to furnish the presidential mansion, "to fix the taste of our country properly . . . everything about you should be substantially good and majestically plain, made to endure."

"I still have all my arms and legs and I still have my smarts," says Gloria Mason, a 73-year-old widow from Wheaton. "Where do I go?" Every morning, millions of men and women-smart, curious, vibrant-face a day with no deadlines, no demands, no schedule.

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