Category: writing
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Beautiful sentences
But it also turned out that no amount of labor and no amount of foresight can save you, no one and nothing can save you except luck. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby.
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Beautiful sentences
The night Phan died, Sabine had thought the tragedy was knowing that Parsifal would die, too, that there was only a limited amount of time. But now Sabine knew the tragedy was living, that there would be years and years to be alone. Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant.
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Beautiful sentences
They’d have a few trial runs, and if the kids from those didn’t measure up they’d recycle them for the parts, until at last they got something that fit all their specs—perfect in every way, not only a math whiz but beautiful as the dawn. Then they’d load this hypothetical wonder kid up with their…
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Beautiful sentences
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism.
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Beautiful sentences
Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds—in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive…
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Beautiful sentences
But what we experience as readers is never exactly what the poet experienced, nor would there be any point in its being, though certainly it has some relation to the poet’s experience. What the poet experienced is not poetry but poetic material; the writing of the poetry is a fresh “experience” for him, and the…
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Beautiful sentences
Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He’s a grown-up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them? (He blames them.) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
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Beautiful sentences
If people only wrote when they had something to say, and never merely because they wanted to write a book, or because they occupied a position such that the writing of books was expected of them, the mass of criticism would not be wholly out of proportion to the small number of critical books worth…
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Susurrus
I happened in one day to come across the words “susurrus” and “susurrate” in two different books (Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Tom McCarthy’s C). Finding the coincidence delightful, I went home and told my wife about the new word(s) I had learned. “Ahh, sussurate,” she whispered. It took me a while to realise that my wife,…