Today, he spoke in flat sentences, and his cigar kept going out.
He moves, seemingly effortlessly, between plain speech and more elevated diction, between short, flat sentences and sinuous, long ones.
The short, flat sentences of which the novel is composed convey shock and despair better than an array of facts or effusive mourning.
His terse flat sentences, jumpy chapters, interleaved placards, collages of stray texts and messages, and nervous grim refrains like "So it goes" and (in "Slapstick") "Hi ho" are a new way of stacking pain, as his fictional ice-nine is a new way of stacking the molecules of water.
He said, "You're going to do a 90-day flat jail sentence" and pushed me on down the line.
The flat, affectless sentences went on.
Like her forms, they only resemble conventional realist details, an atmosphere perhaps encouraged by her flat, functional sentences ("They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink").
Because so many members wanted a piece of the action, the text's momentum was broken up by an endless parade of flat, one-sentence recitations, and many lawmakers later returned to their BlackBerrys or left the chamber.
At first he appears almost devoid of emotion, delivering his words in flat, deliberative sentences as he sits in a blue button-down shirt in front of his fireplace mantel.
