An easier one for me, as I get to react to sentences rather than suffer through their creation. I like to say that editing is a species of acting, insofar as I have to get inside the style of each writer to work effectively. I kept thinking of Gertrude Stein's saying that she knew something was good if the bell rang. I need to know that the structure of sentence and story are sufficiently in sync. Well, the writers will have more interesting things to say about this.
Sentences are the execution or failure of a promise, a seduction that always fails.
Whatever a sentence becomes does damage to what prompted it, effaces or betrays it. The broken promise is whatever life, or lack of life, the sentence starts off with, occasions, brings to mind, and then fails to truly evoke. We make sentences because it is impossible to cry all day. The sentence doesn't come close. Sentences never do, they fall short and remind us of the insufficiency of language to create perfect emblems for the problem of being alive, or rather, our own insufficiency to put the right words in the right order to actually penetrate what was once unsayable.