Greatest sentence you've READ recently

"I was on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket when this van pulled up, which was strange."

-- David Sedaris, "Nuit of the Living Dead," from "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"

 

I'm sorry gentlemen, but I think America's great writers lost out to a high school junior. I left the business about two years ago to teach in the inner city. This was a kid named Sam's response to the writing prompt: "Imagine that you were chosen to clean up your neighborhood. How would you do it? Who would you get to help?"

"To clean up the street I would get a hundred crackheads and pay them two dollars each. They would clean the street so good you could eat off it. Crackheads will clean anything for two dollars. Especially the smoker around my way."

 

"But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."


Cormac McCarthy's characterization of a wolf. If you can do it better, you ARE a wolf.

 

New fav comes from SC Editor on the believing thread...

 

"He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

from McCarthy's newest, The Road

 

As one of the world's bigger McCarthy fans, here are a few more:

"He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold."
-- All the Pretty Horses

"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
-- Blood Meridian

 

The one varietal that truly enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loneliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her sirens call until my wallet or liver, whichever came first, gave out.

 

Hell, every third sentence in "The Road" could be in here.

 

From Harpers, re: remarks by Zbigniew Brzezinski, delivered Feb. 1 at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

"A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the United States blamed on Iran, culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America in a spreading and deepening quagmire, eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."

 

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."

 

A simple one that has stuck with me a long time. From "Ride With Me, Mariah Montana," by Ivan Doig:

"Mariah wasn't waiting for my deep thoughts to swim ashore."

 

"On the last day I walked, I woke up without a hangover. I was still loaded from the night before."

The opening line of the book "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot" by John Callahan.

In about 1989 I read that line in the bookstore, bought the book and finished it in a day.

Follow this link and click on "excerpts" and you can read about the first five page. And you will be hooked and probably have to buy the book. I lent it to a little blonde in our department back in 1990 or so and never got it back. Dammit.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0679728244/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-9129227-1107868#reader-link

EDIT: My apologies, but I didn't read that opening sentence "recently," but it certainly stuck with me considering it was 17-18 years ago.