Favourite sentences

SHOW ME THE PHOTOS THEN LOSER

The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming

Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

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Going to cheat with a passage, from Gravity’s Rainbow. Too hard to disentangle it all. It’s people listening to evensong in a church during the war, just before Christmas.

Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross-hatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there … The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth.

Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one - something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there’s too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out … But on the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him.

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If a man ordered a beer milkshake, he thought, he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known.

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ahhh

couple of my absolute favourite passages, there

tbh, any section where he quits trying to be funny or overcomplicated and just leans into beauty

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what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude so good is that the magical realism is actually properly grounded, almost deadpan but not quite

the whole bit after and including the killer line

"Don’t be simple, Crespi.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead.”

is incredible. ^that sentence sets it up so perfectly with how demure it is in being so plainly cutting.

will narrow it down to this bit:

“One night he sang. Macondo woke up in a kind of angelic stupor that was caused by a zither that deserved more than this world and a voice that led one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love. Pietro Crespi then saw the lights go on in every window in town except that of Amaranta. On November second, All Souls’ Day, his brother opened the store and found all the lamps lighted, all the music boxes opened, and all the clocks striking an interminable hour, and in the midst of that mad concert he found Pietro Crespi at the desk in the rear with his wrists cut by a razor and his hands thrust into a basin of benzene.”

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Even thirty odd years after I first read it I can still remember the visceral thrill of the famous opening sentence:

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

I’ve still never read anything since that made me want to read the rest of a book more.

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Brussels officials were quick to clarify Mr Tusk’s remarks, stressing to BBC correspondent Adam Fleming that the Brexiteers’ special place in hell would be for when they are dead and “not right now”.

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It’s probably an obvious choice but I truly love Under Milk Wood, never did it at school so came to it years later. I could pick anything from it but I love Captain Cats dream and all those economical little one liners,

“Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys, I’m dead”,

“Hold me, Captain, I’m Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very enjoyable.”

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Lindsay Kemp’s obituary for Jack Birkett has stuck in my memory since I first read it, it’s a lovely tribute and the last paragraph in particular speaks to a long and full friendship,

“We shared flats, dressing rooms, boyfriends, bills, good times and bad times, success and failure; a couple of extravagant young dreamers, a couple of aching elders, always entertainers.”

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Pete Postlethwaite’s elegantly phrased response to the question “what was your most embarrassing moment?”

“Underestimating a spot of flatulence in a pair of white jeans. I was 28 and thought I was the bee’s knees.”

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Maybe he’s not going to breathe again, I thought, maybe that’s it, the end, but then it started again, a serrated knife through cardboard.

Sarah Moss.

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I’m just posting this because I enjoy the praise.

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I remembered that earlier actually as i was listening to Sunset Rubdown and he sang that bit in Silver Moons “gone are the days bonfires make me think of you…” and i thought he’s no keith

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Snow White Reaction GIF

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A bit more than one sentence, but a string a beautiful, stunning, foreboding sentences linked together: the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House

"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. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

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:heart: Shirley

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“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry
towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood:
O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to
love, leave me alone for ever.”

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One that springs to mind is another Vonnegut one, from Slaughterhouse Five:

“All this happened, more or less.”

I love how pithy and precise it is about the nature of fiction.

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