Inspired by Doc Jones' first sentences thread from a couple of years ago and also by Mel’s response in the repeat reads thread, here is a thread for any sentences that struck you, for good or ill, at any time. • If you want to provide the author and source, feel free to do that. • If you want to make people guess, let them know and I’m sure you’ll get takers. If you want to give context (e.g. “no sentence has ever made me hornier than this one”), fine. • Just posting the sentence all by itself is good, too. • Sentences can come from anywhere: beginnings, middles, or ends; prose or poetry; fiction or nonfiction. Here’s what I’ll start off with. It’s the opening sentence to a story I first read as a teenager and few sentences before or since ever delivered me into a story quite so fast. “Silent as specters, the tall and the fat thief edged past the dead, noose-strangled watch-leopard, out the thick, lock-picked door of Jengao the Gem Merchant, and strolled east on Cash Street through the thin black night-smog of Lankhmar.”
Cormac McCarthy haters love to point to this sentence as proof that he's a horrible writer: The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight, [it] seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. Rep to anybody who can (without googling, of course) who can guess what sound this sentence is describing.
I'll go with a few from poetry, w/out the line breaks: --"Time held me, green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea." --"Therefore, their sons grow suicidally beautiful at the beginning of October, and gallop terribly against each other's bodies." --"Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom." --"How high that highest candle lights the dark." --"Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, why, when the singing ended and we turned toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, the lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, as the night descended, tilting in the air, mastered the night and portioned out the sea, fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, arranging, deepening, enchanting night." --"Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail whistle about us their spontaneous cries; sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; and, in the isolation of the sky, at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink, downward to darkness, on extended wings." I could go on forever.
The Judge has eaten a large bowl of frijoles negros and has let one rip against the walls of a canyon?
"You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, "No, we're not hiring today..."
One of the finest poems of the second half of the 20th century, even if it does read like prose: Phillip Levine's "What Work Is." (I'm surprised you didn't include the line about how Wagner is the "worst music ever invented.") Any guesses on my (easy) list above?
Read this to my CW class last night as we were discussing line breaks (with a brief pause over "accentual verse" and "syllabic" verse, which Philip Levine's mostly 9-syllable lines above exemplify). When I looked up, most looked as indifferent as they usually do. 3 were stunned by the poem. As a couple were by a couple of the James Wright poems a couple of weeks ago that Bojendyk quoted above. Haven't dropped any Wallace Stevens on them, though.
The gradual shift in Levine's poem from sympathy with both the subject and his brother to a suddenly overwhelming sympathy for the brother, which causes the speaker to seethe, is beautiful. This poem merits being quoted in full: We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is--if you're old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, "No, we're not hiring today," for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behind or ahead because he's home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don't know what work is.
Fern Hill Dylan Thomas. Do poetic sentences really count since the poet is aiming for an aural and visual effect?
History of Animals p.g. 905 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE volume one The ass of both sexes is capable of breeding; and sheds its first teeth, at the age of two and a half years; it sheds its second teeth within six months, its third within another six months, and the fourth after the like interval.
BUZZZZ. Incorrect, but nice guess. Here's a hint: the writer worked for an insurance company in Hartford, CT, and although he spoke fluent French, he never vacationed outside of the United States. Oh, and he was also arguably the greatest genius in American poetry during the 20th century.
Wallace Stevens (If God kills a kitten when you google, what's he do when you use a humongous hint from another poster?)
I came upon the Philip Levine poem completely by accident. It's a shattering work. How he can plumb the depths of a simple and aching a truth so deeply without being even vaguely sentimental is astonishing. Suffice to say I love the poem.
I've always liked this stanza from Paul Simon from Graceland (song and album): She comes back to tell me she's gone As if I didn't know that As if I didn't know my own bed As if I'd never noticed The way she brushed her hair from her forehead And she said losing love Is like a window in your heart Everybody sees you're blown apart Everybody sees the wind blow