I saw a post the
other day on “50 of the most beautiful sentences in literature.”
I liked many of
these but this is a long way from any list I’d put together. For example, one
choice on the list was: “She was lost in her longing to understand.” From
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera. The problem
with this, for me, is that it’s obvious. There’s nothing profound. It seems
almost cliché.
Another weak one,
to me, was: “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter
was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” From Nicole
Krauss, The History of Love. This seems maudlin to me, and cliché. I don’t
like it at all.
On the other
hand, some that I did like were: “In our village, folks say God crumbles up
the old moon into stars.” From Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This is lovely. It resonates to me. It evokes
a sense of history and place. It wouldn’t make my list of 50 favorites but it’s
good.
I also liked
“Isn’t it pretty to think so, by Ernest Hemingway, from The Sun Also
Rises. But my favorite on this list was: “Let the Wild Rumpus Start,” By
Maurice Sendak from Where the Wild Things Are. This was Josh’s favorite
book when he was a kid and I loved, loved, loved reading it to him. This one
would certainly make my list.
So what would be
some of my other personal favorites? Well, many of them would come from
Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which is my favorite book of all
time. Here are a few:
“Figures dark
beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by
the streak of sunset upon their shoulders.”
“We have
outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”
“Left alone, I am
overtaken by the northern void—no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the
crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from
the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue.”
“In the gaunt,
brown face in the mirror—unseen since late September—the blue eyes in a monkish
skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.”
“At dusk, white
egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the
dark had come.”
“In the early
light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and
dark is the power of the universe.”
“The mountains
have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are.”
“My foot slips on
a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and
temples, eternity intersects with present time.”
“In his first
summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in
his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm
wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…”
