Greatest sentence you've READ recently

I am suddenly a HUGE fan of Junod. Read his piece on JOhn Walker Lindh in the June issue, maybe July, couldn't put it down. Called Jones to tell him that Junod is my new reason not to lose my love for journalism.

Amazing, amazing writer. Or he was in that piece. I'll check out this one as soon as it gets delivered.

 

Was that from Better than Sex?

 

It was a dark and stormy night.

 

It was a tale of two halves.

 

"Isn't it pretty to think so?" Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises." Applies on so many levels.

"The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses." Goodbye, Columbus. Ultimate working-class geek/rich girl love story.

 

From earlier today, as part of a conversation between a 7-year-old explorer, William, and an ancient one-legged man he encounters in Graham Greene's "Under the Garden:"

"'News is news however old it is ... A cat's a cat even when it's a dead cat. We get rid of it when it's smelly, but news never smells, however long it's dead. News keeps. And it comes round again whenyou least expect. Like thunder."

Overall, easily this line from Tobias Wolff's "A Bullet in the Brain:"

"Time for shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is."

 

That's what I was gonna say. I've read both, but the line you quoted seemed like it came from HST's "eulogy" of Nixon at the tail end of Better than Sex.

 

The first page of "Your Gotta Play Hurt" is simply loaded with great sentences, starting with the very first:

Here’s how I want the phony little conniving, no-talent, preppiewad asshole of an editor to die: I lace his decaf with Seconal and strap him down in such a way that his head is fastened to my desk and I thump him at cheery intervals with the carriage on my Olympia standard.


If you want the truth, I was doing three of my favorite things: smoking, drinking, and not giving a shit.


I used to go to sleep dreaming about pussy. Now I went to sleep dreaming about killing people.

 

'Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'