The 100 Most Beautiful Sentences from Literature
1. “Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a
kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals or blowing up a dam.”
– Michael Chabon
2. “Jack put his arm out the window, waving his
hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street, and floated away,
gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light
dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious
passage.”
– Marilynne Robinson
3. “A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet
hyphens.”
– J.M. Ledger
4. “And as the ax bites into the wood, be
comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your
soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty
of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.”
– Paul Harding
5. “Within seconds of that thought, the train
entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight
years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one
living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother
to twins.”
– Edward P. Jones
6. “We were all a little drunk with spring,
like the fat bees reeling from flower to flower, and a strange insurrectionary
current ran among us.”
– Tobias Wolff
8. “When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol
he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else,
possibly a woman; and when he had it all — cash, booze, and a wife — he
couldn’t be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through
him and never hit the ground.”
– Denis Johnson
9. “Lizards skit like quick beige sticks.”
– Richard Beard
10. “Saint Rufina, a famous woman who had been a
very lovely young princess with long black hair who decided to give up her
jewelry and become a nun and wear only the roughest clothes, and who died in a
terrible way, by being eaten to death by wild dogs that ran through the church
in the dead of wintertime, was in a special chapel all to herself, where one
arm of her was set aside, that someone had scooped up and saved from the dogs because everyone had loved her for her kindness and her healing ability.”
– Nicholson Baker
11. “I heard the sonic rip of a military jet,
like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only blue
above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of the sky.”
– Rachel Kushner
12. “The sky, at sunset, looked like a
carnivorous flower.”
– Roberto Bolano
13. “His voice traveled like a drug dripped down
the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until
they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up
to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.”
– Ann Patchett
14. “Men are like armored things, mountainous
assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will
self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate
attention.”
– Norman Rush
15. “We waited for the taxi beside the
Holderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window
into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle
rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.”
– W.G. Sebald
16. “On the ground, in the cave, now wrapped in
darkness, they found themselves airborne over hills and valleys, floating
through blue clouds to the mountaintop of pure ecstasy, from where suspended
in space, they felt the world go round and round, before they descended,
sliding down a rainbow, toward the earth, their earth, where the grass, plants,
and animals seemed to be singing a lullaby of silence as Nyawira and Kamiti,
now locked in each other’s arms, slept the sleep of babies, the dawn of a new
day awaiting.”
– Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
17. “Inside us there is something that has no
name, that something is what we are.”
– Jose Saramago
18. “The Captain’s wife played the harp; she had
very long arms, silver as eels on those nights, and armpits as dark and
mysterious as sea urchins; and the sound of the harp was sweet and piercing, so
sweet and piercing it was almost unbearable, and we were forced to let out long
cries, not so much to accompany the music as to protect our hearing from it.”
– Italo Calvino
19. “Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing
and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered
light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”
– Gabriel Garcia
Marquez
20. “In your life there are a few places, or
maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the
other places.”
– Alice Munro
21. “The circle of an empty day is brutal and at
night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
Elena Ferrante
22. “In any case, at a certain point as she wandered
out among the galaxies, among the whirling particles and ineffable numbers,
something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was
lost.”
– Deborah Eisenberg
23. “And I still have other smothered memories,
now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.”
– Vladimir Nabokov
24. “In our world, that’s the way you live your
grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way
it’s been put together is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair
and, when you’re alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need
to believe.”
– Muriel Barbery
25. “Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear
the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales hunting below,
and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose suddenly from the sea, white
up top from bird guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish.”
– Adam Johnson
27. “His fate had taken him off two trains this
morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had shown him the
spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them people tethered by
love, and habit, and work, and meaning, tied into a meaning suddenly exploded,
because contrary to all he had imagined, being tied, being known, did not keep
you safe.”
– Claire Messud
28. “He knows your name and you know his, and
you almost killed him and, because you got so close to doing so but didn’t, you
want to fall on him, weeping, because you are so lonely, so lonely always, and
all contact is contact, and all contact makes us so grateful we want to cry and
dance and cry and cry.”
– Dave Eggers
29. “They were all scarecrows, blown about under
the murdering sun ball with empty ribcages.”
– Cynthia Ozick
30. “Everything was still bathed and saturated
with her presence — higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had
produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people
felt after visions of saints — not that my mother was a saint, only that her
appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark
room.”
– Donna Tartt
31. “We die containing a richness of lovers and
tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if
rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have
hidden in as if caves.”
– Michael Ondaatje
32. “As she picked up her shoes from the closet
and tiptoed from the room, she felt, for a vertiginous moment, an unlawful
excitement.”
– Paula Fox
33. “What I saw made me want to fell the highest
spruce and watch it tip over and fall with a rush and a crash that echoed
through the valley and trim it myself in record time and strip it clean myself
without stopping even though that was the hardest thing to do and drag it to
the river bank with my bare hands and my own back with neither horse nor man to
help me and heave it into the water with the strength I suddenly knew I had,
and the splash and the spray would rise as high as a house in Oslo.”
– Per Petterson
34. “He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath
their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered,
that would rise one day to the light.”
– James Salter
35. “Each of her soothing utterances battered me
more grievously than the last—as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance
whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in
readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be
inflicted.”
– Joseph O’Neill
36. “And maybe I tried with too much mettle — my
lines might have mentioned the “Latin gusto” of her calves and hips in motion,
and how the small blond hairs of her nape quelled my fear of becoming a “non-crooning castrato” — because not four days after I posted the letter, she
arrived at the prison wearing an orange autumn dress, the strapless kind that
could reverse a vasectomy.”
– William Giraldi
38. “It didn’t matter in the end how old they
had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that
they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house,
with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where
they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than
death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
– Jeffrey Eugenides
39. “He’d say “I love you” to every man in the
squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and
no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was
tightening the seat belts around everyone’s soul.”
– Ben Fountain
40. “I came to hate the complainers, with their
dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid,
old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn’s rings.”
– Karen Russell
41. “Maybe life doesn’t get any better than
this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small
wonders where they grow.”
– Barbara Kingsolver
42. “Around the beginning of this century, the
Queen of Thailand was aboard a boat, floating along with her many courtiers,
manservants, maids, feet-bathers, and food tasters, when suddenly the stern hit
a wave and the queen was thrown overboard into the turquoise waters of the
Nippon-Kai, where, despite her pleas for help, she drowned, for not one person
on that boat went to her aid.”
– Zadie Smith
43. “Every native everywhere lives a life of
overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression,
and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.”
– Jamaica Kincaid
44. “As my
grandfather went, arm over arm, his heart making sour little shudders against
his ribs, he kept listening for a sound, the sound of the tiger, the sound of
anything but his own feet and lungs.”
– Tea Obreht
45. “Love is the extremely difficult realization
that something other than oneself is real.”
– Iris Murdoch
46. “We all owe death a life.”
– Salman Rushdie
47. “In the deep gloom he could see the electric
white gashes where the water boiled over the boulders.”
– Ron Carlson
48. “We are souls shut inside a cage of
bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh.”
– Michel Faber
49. “Profound was Gary’s relief the next morning
as he bumped and glided, like a storm-battered yacht, into the safe harbor of
his work week.”
– Jonathan Franzen
50. “Old lovers go the way of old photographs,
bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples,
then the shadings.”
– Margaret Atwood
51. “I am not washed and beautiful, in control
of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed
about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a
delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions,
and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in
spite of them.”
– Annie Dillard
52. “Coming out into the late night and walking
round the building with the secretive grating roll of the stony path beneath
his steps, the evening throbbed back through him as blood thumps slowly,
reliving effort, after exertion.”
– Nadine Gordimer
53. “Sometimes, when
she’s out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all
things animate were beating in unison, a glory, and a connection that sweeps her
out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in
Latin, not in English, not in any known language.”
– T.C. Boyle
55. “Beneath your world of skies and faces and
buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes
disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”
– Anthony Doerr
56. “Two weeks later, the tape arrived of the
race and I memorized it, especially those last hundred yards, Wowie alone,
heading for the finish line, his body rhythmically stretching
and contracting as his four legs reached and folded, reached and folded.”
– Jane Smiley
57. “He had no right to be there, he had already
been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was half naked, it
was dawn and he loved her.”
– Mark Helprin
58. “At a certain point in her life, she
realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not
want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”
– Lydia Davis (have
you ever seen such a beautiful sentence that hinges on tense alone?)
59. “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness
I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith
alone.”
– Wendell Berry
60. “Home, we drank a little wine, put on
some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the
bitter squeaks in our hearts.”
– Sam Lipsyte
61. “And so we stood together like that, at
the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just
holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our
clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other
because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.”
– Kazuo Ishiguro
62. “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot
hanging out.”
– Barry Hannah
63. “We laughed and laughed, together and
separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed
to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could
be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived
my life and didn’t think about my life at all.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer
64. “The only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars.”
– Jack Kerouac
65. “Heaven opened and the water hammered down,
reviving the reluctant old well, green missing the pigless pigsty, carpet
bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored
minds.”
– Arundhati Roy
66. “The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of
flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos —
the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert
67. “Figures dark beneath their loads pass
down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon
their shoulders.”
– Peter Matthiessen
68. “But it goes from bad to worse, and the
moment he sets foot in Black’s room, he feels everything go dark inside him, as
though the night were pressing through his pores, sitting on top of him with a
tremendous weight, and at the same time his head seems to be growing, filling
with air as though about to detach itself from his body and float away.”
– Paul Auster
69. “They were sorry, they were saying with
their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that
feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you
always expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in
you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—”
– George Saunders
70. “Decisions are never really made – at best
they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-around assholery.”
– Thomas Pynchon
72. “The love I felt for her on that train ride
had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many
sullen moons — it was systemic and it was complete.”
– Gary Shteyngart
73. “The week after Halloween had a quality both
hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.”
– Jonathan Lethem
74. “Rather he consoled himself with the fact
that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find
the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”
– Colum McCann
75. “For the first time in years, he felt the
deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too
alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be
able to participate.”
– Colm Toibin
76. “But these thoughts broke apart in his head
and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world
unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.”
– Emily St. John
Mandel (a finalist for beautiful sentences, more like poetry than
prose)
77. “Life was neither something you defended by
hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived
bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on
your own terms.”
– Edwidge Danticat
78. “There are some things that are so
unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
– Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie
79. “But in another city, another valley,
another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another
intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as
if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing,
shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”
– Marlon James
80. “His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he
kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in
every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.”
– E.L. Doctorow
81. “Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a
recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with
annihilation.”
– J.M. Coetzee
82. “The only cities were of ice, bergs with
cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of
almonds.”
– Annie Proulx
83. He had no religious belief, but it was
impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and
that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”
– Ian McEwan
84. “And even if I recognized her strategy, her
sneak attack, I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my
eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he
was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and
irritating imperfections.”
– Amy Tan
85. “Every person had a star, every star had a
friend, and for every person carrying a star there was someone else who
reflected it, and everyone carried this reflection like a secret confidante in
the heart.”
– Orhan Pamuk
86. “Memory is a great deceiver, grief and
longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.”
– Daniel Alarcon
87. “Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor
of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.”
– Hilary Mantel
89. “We need to develop a better descriptive
vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from
unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself
believes in – a way to signal those lies that could be more accurately
described as dreams.”
– Rivka Galchen
90. “She understood as women often do more
easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its
overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.”
– Peter Carey
91. “The road ran away westwards in the mist of
the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some
trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way.”
– Flann O’Brien
92. “We had loving beautiful sex just as soon as
we could get ourselves to stop talking — loving and beautiful in the
expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was
loving and beautiful even if it was full of hamsters ready to kill each other
on sight, but only when they’re awake.”
– Nell Zink
93. “And we know, until they stop their terrible
motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into the walls, until
they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all we can
do.”
– Nathan Englander
94. “He was still a handsome man, with a tanned,
chiseled face and long, thick, wavy white hair, but his cells had begun to
reproduce in a haphazard fashion, destroying the DNA of neighboring cells and
secreting toxins into his body.”
– Michel Houellebecq
95. “You’re an insomniac, you tell yourself:
there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those
phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and
ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light
to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”
– Joyce Carol Oates
96. “In fact, this particular memory is one
she’ll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Ralph
has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty-eight: her
brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparking, shyly learning to dance.”
– Jennifer Egan
97. “Twenty were jammed together on the stoop,
tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested along the banisters,
a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach.”
– Leonard Michaels
98. “It was plain as the stars that time herself
moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and
that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the
sump of my foibles.”
– Jim Harrison
99. “Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers
anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed
him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like
water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes,
his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of
memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.”
– Jesmyn Ward
100. “So, as was often the case when he was
alone and sober, whatever the surroundings, he saw a boy pushing his entrails
back in, holding them in his palms like a fortune-teller’s globe shattering
with bad news; or he heard a boy with only the bottom half of his face intact,
the lips calling mama.”
