Category: writing
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Beautiful Sentences: William Faulkner
My Mother is a fish. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
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Beautiful Sentences: Elie Wiesel
I’m past all desires; too many dead people dwell within me. Elie Wiesel, The Judges.
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Beautiful Sentences: William Faulkner
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality…
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Beautiful Sentences: Elie Wiesel
What if they tried to play tricks with your memory in order to attack the thing it protects—your soul? Elie Wiesel, The Judges.
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Beautiful Sentences: Maria Semple
This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
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Beautiful Sentences: Keith Ridgway
She liked art. She liked paintings and video art and photography. She liked to read about artists and she liked to hear them talk. She had been to all the big London art museums already, and she had been to some small ones too, and some galleries. She wanted to be an artist, she thought,…
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Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li
Instead, we read other people’s stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were no match for those masters. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”
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Beautiful Sentences: Steven Millhauser
One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms:…
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Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li
You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”