a life-long sentence?

I Love Books is asking readers for their favorite sentences from novels. Among the responses:

"He gave me a look, a kind of wide-eyed, reproachful look, such as a dying newt might have given me, if I had forgotten to change its water regularly."
-P.G.Wodehouse

"I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce."
-Joseph Heller, Something Happened

"The most time-efficient way to say no to something is to say yes, and then never do it."
-Scott Adams- The Joy of Work

"It was an uncertain spring."
-Virginia Woolf, The Years.

I've always struggled naming "favorites." I'm disorganized and I have a bad memory, but, also, books are moments more than texts to me. A sentence fits my mood, and the more precise the tailoring, the less likely it is the sentence will fit other moods as well.
Still, here's some sentences or phrases that I like. They're not favorites, but they fall into one of three categories for me: 1) the metaphors feel like rock candy needles: visceral as sugar, because they're apt and sharp and careful, 2) their ideas articulate me to myself, or 3) they clink against a story that I'm writing, and the clink sounds like a toast. Mainly, they do what I'd like to do in fiction, and are examples of the kind of writing I prefer.

"He noted with distaste his own trick of appealing for sympathy. A personality had its own ways. A mind might observe them without approval."
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"The satisfaction she took in herself was positvely plural — imperial."
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"And inside the train on the worn green bristle of the seats, Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife. He peeled and twirled and cut with Europeam efficiency."
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"…lights like drops of fat in yellow broth…"
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"Her decisiveness fascinated him, and in such fascination he discovered his own childishness."
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"'Poor Moses — unless you're having a bad time with a woman you can't believe you're being serious.'"
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares."
-Saul Bellow, Herzog

"I cried everynight as I rocked you to sleep. You must have grown up thinking my sobbing was a song."
-Carole Maso, The Art Lover

"He drank till he became drunk, his eyes moist, his laugh general."
-Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

"The night, intent seamstress, fed the fabric of water under the needle of our hull, steadily, firmly, except the boat wasn't stitching the water together but ripping it apart into long white threads."
-Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

"The silence was thoughtful, as though it were an eyelash beating against a pillowcase."
-Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

"I hypothesized a lover who'd take me away … His delay in coming went on so long that soon I'd passed from anticipation to nostalgia."
-Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

"That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant."
-Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

"'Let's go,' he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince."
-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarly empty.) It was one's body feeling, not one's mind."
-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"'A face is like a name … Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: this is my self? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble. Everything starts to crumble."
'What starts to crumble? What's the matter with you, Agnes? What's the matter with you lately?'
She glanced at him, then lowered her head. He looked incorrigibly like his mother."
-Milan Kundera, Immortality

"No, thinks Rubens; in the instant that he grasps the comical, man does not laugh; laughter follows afterward as a physical reaction, as a convulsion no longer containing any thought."
-Milan Kundera, Immortality

"Agnes did not want Paul to suffer from a sense of guilt. Not out of compassion for him, but rather out of jealousy: she didn't want him to feel so responsible for Laura, to be so tied to her in his thoughts."
-Milan Kundera, Immortality

That's all I'll type for now. Maybe I'll continue, in another post, sometime soon.

Posted by nchicha at April 13, 2004 06:09 PM