Category: beautiful sentences

Translation is not unlike an act of channeling, you write and you do not write the words. Katie Kitamura, A Separation.

She couldn’t stop calling or writing or driving past the house. That was what it meant to love someone, right? You couldn’t leave them, even if they hated you. You could never let them go. Brit Bennett, The Mothers.

Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness. Julia Álvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies.

The light surrounded him like a halo that was too big for a saint and had to be shared by all who were near. Uwem Akpan, “Say You’re One of Them.” 

He wasn’t about to be that black guy. (You know, the one who scouts ahead and gets his ass sliced in two. Somewhere near the first ten minutes of the horror movie. Although, to be fair, moviemakers have largely stopped that practice. Now there’s usually one amiable but forgettable white person who dies first, and […]

But we, most of us, lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive. Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man.

We knew full well that hate did not require an initial offense. Only original sin, only being born. Brenda Peynado, “The Whitest Girl.”

Mine is not a church of the saved, but a church of the lost. Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God.

Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even then this was merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody. Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon.