Category: writing
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Beautiful Sentences: Martha Gellhorn
You never even stopped to notice the dead; they weren’t men any more They lay along the roads, in the fields, in the streets of villages, under the trees, like old dirty laundry sacks, nothing, just dead. You never knew how much of nothing dying was until you saw the shapeless, nameless, meaningless dead. Martha…
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Beautiful Sentences: Marguerite Duras
In group photographs of the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, the murderer-members look to me as if they’re lonely in the same way as Rabier—the solitude of cholera victims, or worse, with moth-eaten souls, each loneliness its own disguise, its teeth chattering for fear of its neighbor, for fear of tomorrow’s execution.…
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Beautiful Sentences: Mario Vargas Llosa
El pelo que le faltaba en la cabeza le sobresalía de las orejas, cuyas matas de vellos negrísimos irrumpían, agresivas, como grotesca compensación a la calvicie del Constitutucionalista Beodo. Mario Vargas Llosa, La Fiesta del Chivo.
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Beautiful Sentences: Renata Adler
It would not have been a crime, of course. But it would have taken us over that edge of irreversible violence where, whether in a pattern of years or in the flicker of an oversight, crime begins. Renata Adler, Speedboat.
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Beautiful Sentences: Aldous Huxley
Man can’t live by bread alone, because they need to feel their life has a point. That’s why they take to idealism. But it’s a matter of experience and observation that most idealism leads to war, persecution and mass insanity. Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
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Beautiful Sentences: Salman Rushdie
At the beginning of love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right, Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that…
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Beautiful Sentences: Katherine Anne Porter
The sailors were out again washing down the decks, which rolled gently as the Vera set out resolutely for the Canaries with only a head or two looking out of her portholes to watch the eternal love affair between the moon and the sea. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools.
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Beautiful Sentences: Laudomia Bonnani
The faded saints swayed from the frescoes in elusive benevolence. Laudomia Bonnani. The Reprisal.
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Beautiful Sentences: Elena Ferrante
All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table…