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Ten Best Sentences in Fiction or Non-Fiction

Get off my lawn!

There has been a lot of interesting discussion online today about a recently released list of what are being called 'the ten best sentences in fiction and nonfiction' (unfortunately, the website has been crashing all day, but here is the link to the original list). Not surprisingly, Joyce was on the list, and was also a favorite of many commenters.

While the Toni Morrison quote was my favorite from the top 10 list, I do like this line from Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera:

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

That said, the opening line of 100 Years of Solitude (which I freely admit, I have never been able to plow my way through) is a classic as well:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Boardsies, do you have a favorite that isn't on the list? If so, please share!

EDIT: Please post the quote and the author!

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Ruu

Poor AM. http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1055429-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.

Riskymove

"It was a dark and stormy night"

osarusan

It is nearly 2am here, and I was almost asleep, until this hit me:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

A stanza from Thomas Gray's 'Elegy written in a country churchyard.'

Edit:

Though we cannot make our sun
stand still, yet we can make him run.

last line from Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress

2nd edit:

Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.

Last line if a written by ben Johnson in memory of shakespeare, can't remember the name.

I'll never get to sleep. Great thread.

Muise...

osarusan wrote: »

It is nearly 2am here, and I was almost asleep, until this hit me:

A stanza from Thomas Gray's 'Elegy written in a country churchyard.'

Leaving Cert English is a helluva drug.

Leogirl

"he said it was interesting. He used the word 'textured'. He said 'smooth' is boring but 'textured' was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever had tried to hurt me.”

From The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Might not be great literature but the book & this line really struck something with me.

e_e

"That money was just resting in my account."

Rothko

"No time for thinking, he thought."

Simple yet profound.

jane82

From changing of the gaurds by bob dylan. Im sure its total gibberish but amazing imagery all through the lyrics.

They shaved her head
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn't help but follow
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil.

[Deleted User]

"How about a kick in the face?" facekicker

Stavros Murphy

"I like blondes, and I'm not bothered how they get that way" - Rusty, in RumbleFish. My favorite book, and Motorcycle boy, my favorite character. It's a long time since I read it.

The One Who Knocks

"Have no fear, little fish,"
Said the Cat in the Hat.
"These Things are good Things."
And he gave them a pat.
"They are tame. Oh, so tame!
They have come here to play.
They will give you some fun
On this wet, wet, wet day."

The Diabolical Monocle

Can you lend a n**** a pencil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WiYt7gAySw

Auldloon

"It's low patch ass time" Herself, dreaming

“There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell"

Edward Whymper British climber.

The Diabolical Monocle

Und zumorrow ...ve come back ... and ve cut off your johnson.

-Lanky nihilist (big lebowski)

Lawros Tache

"For sale: baby shoes. never worn..."

Hemingway.

TheShockmaster

"By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness" -Pablo Neruda

Obliq

Anything at all by Samuel Beckett - I love his brand of humour.

“Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.”

“let us say before i go any further, that i forgive nobody. i wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.”

"It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger"

Waaay too many to choose from.

Also Flann O'Brien/Brian O'Nolan - At Swim-Two-Birds. All of it actually, but one of the more famous parts:

“Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man.

Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I subsequently became addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.”

eeeee

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

Lolita, Nabakov.

Best first line ever.

Burky126

"To the last,I grapple with thee;from hell's heart,I stab at thee;for hate's sake,I spit my last breath at thee."

Part of Ahab's final declaration against the white whale in Moby Dick.

berettaman

Great thread...

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke..Cormac McCarthy the Road.

Also:

There is no God and we are his prophets

First_October

“The flies have conquered the flypaper.”

“I'm tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it.”

“And the girl,' Lanser continued, 'the girl, Lieutenant, you may rape her, or protect her, or marry her--that is of no importance so long as you shoot her when it is ordered.”

Three great lines from The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row also have some cracking sentences.

eeeee

^^

"There ain't no sin and there're ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do." Steinback, The Grapes of Wrath. Epic book.

Call Me Jimmy

Sounds like I've got a book to read

Ciderswigger

"That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pyjama pocket over his heart"

losthorizon

“When Švejk subsequently described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in exceptionally eulogistic terms: 'I really don't know why those loonies get so angry when they're kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite. If anyone did this anywhere on the promenade people would be astonished, but there it's the most common or garden thing to do. There's a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of.”
― Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

“Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Greene is my favourite author although I haven't read one of his books in years

“No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

fruvai

WatchWolf wrote: »

A screaming comes across the sky.

Gravity's Rainbow has so many great quotes

"We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger poised on Miss Enola Gay's atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland Sea..."

"Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own ****. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals."

"So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death."

"The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger."

"...a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it..."

Tipsy McSwagger

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

mikom

It was the best of times........ it was the blurst of times.

Tar.Aldarion

Tipsy McSwagger wrote: »

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

I cam here to post that >.<

beano345

" my new clothes was all greased up and clayey,and I was dog tired"