Favourite Sentences VIII

Butterflies sailed across the open field, and the air was tinged with the sweet smell of peaches and warm earth. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, letting the scents travel through my body. I was in the middle of an accidental kind of happiness that made me grateful for having a nose. 

From Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

Beth Hoffman

Page 234

It's summertime and joy on the page. I absolutely love the way that reading this made me feel.

Some of my favourite sentences: Part VII

And though the professional jargon didn't desert him - it's second nature - his prose accumulated awkwardly. Individual words brought to mind unwieldy objects - bicycles, deckchairs, coat hangers - strewn across his path. He composed a sentence in his head, then lost it on the page, or typed himself into a grammatical cul-de-sac and had to sweat his way out.

From Saturday 

Ian McEwan

page 11

Not only is this sentence wonderfully evocative, it captures how I feel on a bad thesis writing day. Sometimes it flows, other times it's an uphill battle. Just got to push through the pain!!

Some of my favourite sentences: Part VI

...and I was not immune to the power of that shimmering fiction that any citizen of an oppressive and aggressively nationalistic country will understand only too well: the magical unity conjured by the word we.

From Snow

Orhan Pamuk

page 393 

Some of my favourite sentences: Part V

That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

From The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Some of my favourite sentences: Part IV

This nugget of wisdom comes from Jess Walter's novel The Zero, one of the post 9/11 novels I'm reading for my thesis.

"No kid ever choses to have his parents. They're just there when you wake up one day. And you can't just keep having sex and have more parents if these two don't work out."

Ah, ain't that the truth!

Some of my favourite sentences: Part III

I've been very re-miss on keeping this up to date, but that doesn't mean I haven't come across some fantastic turns of phrase, truisms or use of the English language.

One that I wanted to include here is not for its beauty but for how true it is. If you're a booky type like me, you'll know.

"Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it has been shaped into acceptable expository prose."

Carol Shields

Unless

Some of my favourite sentences: Part II

This particular gem comes from a New Zealand novel called Relative Strangers by Emma Neale.

"As soon as he got part way across the floor: iiirrrrr. He'd hit a floorboard that sounded like it was auditioning for a haunted house soundtrack." (138).

This one made me laugh out loud, I just love it. The sheer genius of it meant that I had to add it to my collection. More to follow...

Some of my favourite sentences: Part I

Do you ever read a sentence in a book or a line in a poem and stop, your breath taken away by the beauty or resonance or truth of it? I know I take great delight when I find these nuggets of pure literary gold, so I have decided to gather them all together in one place so others can appreciate them too. Here are a few of my favourite sentences/lines/phrases:

"A gossamer blanket of coal dust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic."

From God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (p.86)


"Then a pair of taxis went head to head in a distant country so suddenly I didn't see the difference but it was a wide white threshold."

From 'a woman, a rose and what has it to do with her or they with one another?' by Michele Leggott in as far as I can see (p.36)


"I go to libraries because they are the ocean"

From 'perse' by Michele Leggott in as far as I can see (p.12)


More to follow...