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“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

” Most readers seem to expect fiction to have a single, stable truth. If it is a realist story, it must of course be “realistic” and have a certain objective truth. If it is a fantasy or science fiction story, readers expect a coherent world and consistent rules. Part of the genius of Kafka is his willingness to ignore those concerns. “

‘Of all the beautiful sentences out there, I choose Walser’s for one reason and one reason only: that glorious, oh so subversive adverb.”

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself…” —Virgina Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway It’s not much in terms of complication. It’s a simple voice; the prose is clean and orderly. But the richness of the novel is concealed in the sentence. Woolf will move fluidly through time, within time, around time — move between the [...]

“Nearly one hundred years after it was written, it describes America’s current political climate.”

“It’s 1921 (or thereabouts) and he’s in Rome again. There are no mosquitoes in his room, he tells us, and few flies, and no incident involving either insect follows. Why even speak of them? Well, because it’s Norman Douglas, that’s why.”

“Of course, for me, the real wonder of this sentence is that it attempts to describe how one represents being as the moment (if one reads record as photographs) when someone takes a picture of someone taking a picture — which as it happens, is a sentence I’ve never read.”

“It is the sentence that in a stroke convinces me that it inhabits an alternate, and beautiful, universe, and that our own world is nothing but a sustained fraud.”

“This one bit of dialog has stayed with me since I first read the story in 1996….”

“It’s the most efficiently, the most brutally, that a character has ever been killed off.”

“Have ever shoes been more eloquent since Hemingway’s unworn baby pair?”

“There! that sentence is worthy of one of your novels at its best!”

“It was, as Dickinson reminds us it should be, as if the top of my head had blown right off.”

“Not a fortress, but a forest”

“Putting words on the backs of rhythms.”

“the misconception that human brains are located in the head.”

“Dimples like knots in a tree…”

“Idahoans regularly ride horses to saloons and fistfight mountain lions….”

“So what is truth and what is fiction?”

I reached the final sentence and it knocked the breath out of me.

“I believe that the purpose of storytelling is to convey emotion…”

“Gerald died that afternoon.” —E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey So begins Chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s novel The Longest Journey. For the first four chapters of the novel, Gerald has been gloriously alive. He has been hale and hearty. He has been vigorous and stupid. He has been nothing less than the embodiment of [...]

“But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.” Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure Victorian novelists almost always kept the hem of a coattail or tip of a walking-stick visible in the shadowy wings of their narratives. Often they [...]

We here at Tin House love sentences. They’re why we do what we do. We often come across sentences so good we read them over and over again; and there are the ones that demand to be read aloud to everyone in the office; and then there are the ones we have to take a [...]