Greatest sentence you've READ recently

'Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.'

 

Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me but...

 

Call me Ishmael.

 

"IT WOULD HELP if we could see his dreams."

Michael Knox Beran, Thomas Jefferson: Portrait of a Restless Mind

 

From everyone's favorite, Rick Reilly in SI last month:

"I just unzipped my fly, stuck a cup between my legs and poured myself a cold one. (Has that sentence ever been written before?)"

 

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

 

Pressboxer, you stole mine. I don't think one can spend time at a paper in Texas without reading and truly appreciating Dan Jenkins.

 

YGPH should be required reading for all aspiring sportswriters. Of course, you'd never get college kids to believe that 50-something guys who are battling "the exact opposite of a stiff dick and a limber back" aren't banging Jeannie at the Masters AND Nell back home in Manhattan.

To hell with being as good a writer as Jenkins, I'd settle for getting laid half as much as his characters.

 

Jesus wept.

 

Somehow those folks in the 19th century got off some good ones:

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."--Anna Karenina

"Call me Ishmael."

 

Loved that bit in The Tender Bar where he talks about the Hagler-Leonard fight and how boxers and drinkers both measure time in rounds. Wish I could recall the complete sentence, it was great.

 

For all time and forever, since I first read it in 1972:

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. "

-- James Joyce, The Dead.