Everyone who reads obsessively has a favorite sentence.
Here's mine:
Their history was like a child found murdered in the snow.
What's your favorite sentence? Props if you know what book mine's from.
(ps- if you don't read, what's your favorite movie quote?)
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21 comments:
Some upwelling in the dark fishbowl atop the spine later splashed dreams, patterns memory-resistant as a swirl noctilucae, across consciousness' thin, transparent rim, save for the kinesthetic/synesthetic DO YOU FEEL ME LED? which must have lasted a timeless time longer than the rest, for later, much later, morning's third coffee touched it to a penny's worth of spin, of color.
although it may have fallen out of sentence category and pushed it's way into paragraph's domain.
I've always thought I was an obsessive reader, but gee... I honestly can't come up with a favorite sentence right now!
Hello, Michele sent me.
Hmm. This is a tough one. I read a lot. I barely remember plots, much less sentences. But I do love the opening lines to Middlesex.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Doesn't that make you want to read on?
By the way, Michele sent me. Oh, and I have a book blog at http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters
Kim, I actually scrolled down too far and just read the line and knew what it was from! :)
I like (and even adapted it in a blog post) -"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanquished wake of the plane that brought her here...
from Pattern Recognition, a William Gibson book I read a while ago, but strangely stays with me.
rashbre
It's hard to name one favorite sentence. I think I'll say the one from The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy), which I didn't read in English but it is something like "Your life can completely change in a second". This is so true, that's why I like it. Here via Michele's
Here via Michele, too. I can't remember my favorite sentence, but I had lunch with somebody who told me his favorite was: Call me Ishmael.
That's a good quote, and I couldn't figure out where it came from. You had better tell us at some point...
Here is my quote, and I'd love to see if someone has ever run into it before.
"Somewhere between puberty and senility lies ecstasy".
Not necessarily my favorite - simply what popped into my head.
Interesting post - thanks. mw
I go where michele leads...
A favorite from the movies:
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
from "Dead Poet's Society"
hello, michele sent me!
Damn, I am just not sure.
I will have to think about it.
BTW, my quote was from Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides. It's a wonderful, tragically beautiful book and didn't deserve to be made into a Barbara Streisand movie. They had to leave out so much of the book; the movie represents, like, 20 pages. I wholeheartedly recommend it -- I'm amazed everytime I read it.
You have inspired me to start reading again. I love the books people are talking about here, and I'm ashamed to say that I've started reading several books in the last few months and have not finished them. I need to get back to reading.
One of my favorite lines, though, is this one (hope I get it right):
"Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again..."
Oh... and michele sent me!
want to do something this week? sorry I've been so busy!
I just found your blog recently while looking at a listing for local blogs. (I live in St Pete) And I love books and love this entry so hope you don't mind that I participate.
I am currently reading "Maps for Lost Lovers" by Nadeem Aslam. I am only on page 52 but I love his language and style. My favorite sentence so far (and believe me this is hard to choose) is as follows:
"Most of the meal was taken by candlelight, the wet prints the white woman's high-heeled shoes had made on the linoleum of the kitchen floor shining like exclamation marks in the yellow light." (pg 37)
This sentence was so creative to me, I simple was in awe.
I'm sorry, but I also have to succumb to an entire paragraph to capture the essence of my favorite sentence--the opening paragraph of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant
act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is
sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous,
Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat that this
recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness,
misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods
of the earth say, Let there be light.
"Return of the Native" Thomas Hardy
i think my favorite from a book is, "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." okay, so that's two. sue me.
favorite movie line of all time is the infamous, "i chose not to choose life. and the reasons ... there are no reasons. who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"
gonna have to check out that book blog!!
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."
Still makes me tear up, after a hundred thousand readings. Perhaps because I know the context all too well.
Haven't thought about good sentences & I don't read enough, but here's a brief passage I dig:
"Call me Ishmael. It was cold, very cold, here in the mountain town of Kilimanjaroville. I could hear a bell. It was tolling. I knew exactly for who it was tolling, too. It was tolling for me, Ishmael Twist" from Writing is Easy! in Steve Martin's "Pure Drivel".
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