A thoughtfully crafted sentence causes me to float a bit higher than the rest. I find the books I love most are those littered with hundreds of underlined sentences and a coded system of dots, double-underlines, and exclamation points.
I want a sentence to hit me like a sack of bricks. I want to feel like I’ve approached a cliff, been pushed off, and then caught and flown back to the edge to peer over once again.
The best sentences often say things we are afraid to say but feel to be true. Sometimes they’re overly fruity, romantic, rambling. Sometimes they’re cold and concise. Sometimes they make little to no sense and are all the better for it. All in all, good sentences lift us to a high pitch of feeling, reminding us what it is to be human.
…
“It may seem strange, in a general way, that such trifles should bother me but, per contra, is not every writer precisely a person who bothers about trifles?”
The Passenger
Vladimir Nabokov
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
“When it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies within you.”
So, you want to be a writer?
Charles Bukowski
“The creator, the artist, the extraordinary man, is merely the ordinary man intensified: a person whose life is sometimes lifted to a high pitch of feeling and who has the gift of making others share in his excitement”
Robert Frost: The Man and the Poet
Introduction by Louis Untermeyer
“She left me the way people leave a hotel room.”
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
“You must from now on, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of…”
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1944
“No writer can tell the truth about people — which is that they are much more interesting than any characters”
Fear of Flying
Erica Jong
“Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
“For there is only misfortune in not being loved; there is misery in not loving.”
Summer
Albert Camus