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“He magicked flowers onto paper, so that upon it they quivered, rejoiced, and smiled, swaying in their plantlike ways; his concern was the flesh of flowers, the spirit of the secret which dwells in the resistance a thing with special properties offers to understanding. “ — “Thoughts on Cezanne” by Robert Walser (translated into English [...]

“At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, [...]

“And who could blame me, after that trip across the mountain floor on which there was no footprint, the stars flaming like oranges, those multimillion tons of exploding gas looking so mild and fresh in the dark of the sky; and altogether, that freshness, you know, that is like autumn freshness when you go out [...]

“He ogled old women and pregnant women and women whose photographs were passing on the sides of buses and, this morning, a woman with close-cropped black hair and tear-stained cheeks, who wouldn’t be half bad if she’d just make an effort, clean up a little and invest in some decent clothes, some white tights and [...]

“Sometimes when I am weary of seeing things in that flat, three-dimensional manner once so much boasted of, two plus two, and all the rest, there seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and [...]

“The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room.” Charles McCarry, The Secret Lovers Two pages into Charles McCarry’s 1977 novel The Secret Lovers, the reader comes across this sentence buried in the middle of a paragraph. A throwaway line, a felicitous toss-off. The simile made [...]

On John Updike

On Barry Hannah’s Airships

On Raymond Chandler

On Patrick Besson

On Flann O’Brien

“The total effect was that of gallantry in the face of odds.”—The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Art of the Sentence: Town Of Shadows

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
-Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Estaban acaso a la puerta dos mujeres mozas, destas que llaman del partido, las cuales iban a Sevilla con unos arrieros que en la venta aquella noche acertaron a hacer jornada; y, como a nuestro aventurero todo cuanto pensaba, veía o imaginaba le parecía ser hecho y pasar al modo de lo que había leído, [...]

“Ah bet he’s wore out half a dozen Adam’s apples since Spunk’s been on the job with Lena.”

“Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks.”

– William Faulkner, “As I Lay Dying”

“At first Juliet did not understand what was meant.” — Alice Munro, “Soon“ This sentence is a daughter’s reaction to her mother’s greeting after a long separation. Juliet’s mother, Sara, has just said excitedly, “We’re long and short, but still we match.” Her first words. No hello, no hug. No there you are, I’ve missed [...]

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life [...]

On Edward Lear

On Flannery O’Connor

This all seems like a load of hooey to Mr. Morel.

A really long sentence in a paragraph of short-to-average-length sentences has an effect on the reader similar to that of a topspin lob in tennis: it changes the pace and adjusts the eye. Like a tennis player retreating to see if the lob will land inside the baseline, the reader waits with escalating anxiety for the sentence-ending period to arrive.

“My throat closes every time I read this last line”