Greatest sentence you've READ recently

It's hard to limit this to sentences instead of paragraphs. But here are two (both non-sports) that I keep going back to. The first, I've posted here numerous times. It's from Tim O'Brien's New York Times magazine essay where he's up late at night, thinking about life and heartache, and is contemplating killing himself:

"It's June 11, I think -- I'm too tired to find a calendar. Almost 5 A.M. In another hour it'll be 5:01. I'm on war time, which is the time we're all on at one point or another: when fathers die, when husbands ask for divorce, when women you love are fast asleep beside men you wish were you."

The second is from a collection of essays by Richard Hugo, a writer and poet of little regard, but still one of my favorites. It, too, is about sadness and heartache, which might say more about me than I'd care to admit, I suppose. Anyway, I love the simplicity.

"There was a long and dreadful scene in the Missoula railroad station where my wife left for good. We sat and cried for hours. We had been close and it was over. The Missoula railroad station is so cheerless, you'd weep there saying goodbye to Hitler. Then she was gone and I was walking alone down Higgins Avenue, for some reason unusually aware of my shoes each step I took. Then, I was sitting in a bar next to the station, tears pouring down my face, and the bartender sophisticated enough to say nothing. He'd seen drunks cry before."

 

"You exposed your penis on national television? How could you?"

Augusten Burroughs. First line of Sellevision, his first novel.

 

"Welcome back!! Please click here for an important update from Webby."

 

"Today is a ravishing day, and I will put on a short skirt and high heels and see how much of the future I can inhale."

Marjorie Williams (RIP) from a link Double Down sent me a while back. Check out 'The Woman At The Washington Zoo.'

 

He had the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist.

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.

 

Sirs, Madames,

"In the land of the pickup truck and cream gravy for breakfast, down where the wind can blow through the walls of a diner and into the grieving lyrics of a country song on a jukebox -- down there in dirt-kicking Big Eight territory -- they played a football game on Thanksgiving Day that was mainly for the quarterbacks on the field and for self-styled gridiron intellectuals everywhere ..."

&

"At this rate, before I knowed it we would be home again, and I thought about me riding up to Frenchman's Bend in this big car with a soldier running it, and all of a sudden I begun to cry. I never knowed I was fixing to, and I couldn't stop it. I set there by that soldier, crying. We was going fast."

YHS, etc

 

Something like this. (Feel free to provide the exact quote if you know it)
"Despite the abominable handling of the press luggage at the Brussels airport, the Belgian Open got off to a rather decent start Thursday."

 

The judge gave him 25 years to life.

 

You never know where a hobby is going to take you. Someone who likes to cook might eventually open a restaurant.

 

From "Empire Rising," describing the end of a 1930 NYC speakeasy brawl sparked when drunk tourist businessmen from Ohio piss off the wrong people:

"The fat man, the reveler, the former college football standout, was crawling on his hands and knees after his friends, weeping and bleeding, as a gutter-thin West Sider methodically kicked him in the ass in between sips of beer."

 

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Always liked that one as an opener.

 

From Jones on the chess article thread:

"And then here's Michael, jamming his bishop up my ass."