Sunday Sentence: Donna Leon

As inspired by Fobbit and Brave Deeds author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

Grief lies inside us like a land mine: heavy footsteps will pass it by safely, while others, even those as light as air, will cause it to explode.

-- Donna Leon, Earthly Remains

Sunday Sentence: 'The Essex Serpent'

As inspired by Fobbit and Brave Deeds author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentences I've read this week, presented without context or commentary:

Had it always been here -- this marvelous black earth in which she sank to her ankles, this coral-colored fungus frilling the branches at her feet? Had birds always sung? Had the rain always this light touch, as if she might inhabit it?

... sometimes I think we must be walking on shoals of bodies without realizing it and all the earth's a graveyard.

-- Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

Sunday Sentence: Human Acts

As inspired by David Abrams, author of the upcoming Brave Deeds (August, Grove Atlantic), the best sentence(s) I read this week, without further comment or commentary:

My shadow's edges became aware of a quiet touch; the presence of another soul. ... Sad flames licking up against a smooth wall of glass, only to wordlessly slide away, outdone by whatever barrier was there.

-- Human Acts, Han Kang

Sunday Sentence: Paul Auster

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

The word psyche means two things in Greek, his aunt said. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren't so different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That's what happens to souls as well, Archie. They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.

-- Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

Sunday Sentence: The Land of Dreams

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further comment or context:

A boy goes out fishing and has a lot of fun, and then suddenly one day his whole boring adult life starts up, with all its obligations. Fifty years later the interruption is finally over, and he can go back to fishing again.

-- The Land of Dreams by Vidar Sundstol (translated by Tiina Nunnally)

Sunday Sentence: Louise Penny

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I've read this week, presented without further comment or context:

There was a world out there. A world filled with beauty and love, and goodness. And cruelty and killers, and vile acts contemplated and being committed at this very moment.

-- Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

Sunday Sentence: Ann Patchett

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further comment or context:

Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job.

-- Ann Patchett, Comonwealth

Sunday Sentence: More from 'Homegoing'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this past week, without further comment or context:

But she wasn't just staring into space; she was listening to all the sounds the world had to offer, to all the people who inhabited those spaces the others could not see. She was wandering.

-- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Sunday Sentence: Yaa Gyasi

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further comment or commentary:

Ness looked at the woman. She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi's unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother's heart.

-- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Sunday Sentence: Virginia Woolf

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further commentary or context:

"It seemed to her such nonsense -- inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough."

-- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Sunday Sentence: 'Sweetbitter'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence I read this week, without further comment or context:

I forgot the parade of people in my life as thin as mesh screens, who couldn't catch whatever it was I wanted to say to them, and I forgot how I drove down dirt roads between dessicated fields, under an oppressive guard of stars, and felt nothing.

-- Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Sunday Sentence: Elizabeth Strout

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this past week, without further context or commentary:

Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.

-- Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton

Sunday Sentence: Shawn Vestal

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this past week, presented without further comment or context (except to note this book is scheduled to be published on April 12):

What do you call that, when the world guides you toward its purpose? We believed, America. ... We believed that in saying these things, we were already making them true.

-- Shawn Vestal, Daredevils

Sunday Sentence: The Portable Veblen

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or comment:

She formed this estimation in faith that it would be so, because that was what she wanted, a family at ease, a family free from the heat of a central beast, traveling through vents to cook you in every room.

-- Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen

Sunday Sentence: 'Undermajordomo Minor'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further comment or context:

There is an instance of import when one experiences the conception of love, he realized. It was though you had been waiting for it all along; as if you'd known it was approaching, and so when it arrives you reach out to greet it with an innate familiarity.

-- Patrick deWitt, Undermajordomo Minor

Sunday Sentence: Patrick Modiano

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

(He) suddenly recalled a passage from the memoirs of a French philosopher. She had been shocked by what a woman had said during the war: "After all, the war doesn't alter my relationship with a blade of grass." She probably reckoned that this woman was frivolous or indifferent. But for him, Daragane, the phrase had another meaning: in periods of disaster or mental anxiety, all you need do is look for a fixed point in order to keep your balance and not topple overboard. Your gaze alights on a blade of grass, a tree, the petals of a flower, as though you were clinging on to a buoy.

-- So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano

Sunday Sentence: 'The Lost Landscape'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

What is fleeting and transient in time, no doubt soon forgotten by adults, or rendered inconsequential in their lives, may burrow deep into the child-witness's soul ...

-- Joyce Carol Oates, The Lost Landscape

Sunday Sentence: Salman Rushdie

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

A man who expected the worst. Also, a superstitious man, a crosser of fingers, who knew, for example, that in America wicked spirits lived in trees so it was necessary to knock on wood to drive them out, whereas British tree spirits (he was an admirer of the British countryside) were friendly creatures so one touched wood to get the benefit of their benevolence.

-- Salman Rushdie, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Sunday Sentence: 'Against the Country'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without context or commentary:

So it was that whereas we were led to believe we had acquired the land, when in fact the land had acquired us; and whereas the land was, in my estimation, perfectly happy with this arrangement, though in a remarkably short time we were not; and whereas the law in no way met its onus to correct, or at a minimum to address, this injustice as it might any other; therefore my father's war on the property, and its war on us, could in no way be considered actionable, which left us his only incentive to sue for peace the psychological welfare of his famly, which he seemed to regard, if that word even applies here, as no more than an annoyance ... So it was that we stumbled into the country life like an infant who takes his first astonished steps and then, as his frightened grin dissolves, reaches out to catch himself against the side of a red-hot wood stove.

-- Ben Metcalf, Against the Country

Sunday Sentence: 'The Turner House'

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further context or commentary:

One man's haunting is another man's hallowed guest.

-- Angela Flournoy, The Turner House