Category: writing
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Beautiful Sentences: Louis Erdrich
Mine is not a church of the saved, but a church of the lost. Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God.
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Beautiful Sentences: Pascal Mercier
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.
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Beautiful Sentences: Siel Ju
We listened to the teenager next door with his basketball in the driveway, two quick bounces each time, followed by a lonely thump off the backboard. Siel Ju, Cake Time.
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Beautiful Sentences: Pascal Mercier
And the words have to have a rhythm. A rhythm as the words have in Saint John, for example. Only then, only when they are poetry, do they really shed light on things. Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon.
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Beautiful Sentences: Tadeusz Borowski
Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples, and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the…
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Beautiful Sentences: Gerda Weissmann Klein
Why? Why did we walk like meek sheep to the slaughterhouse? Why did we not fight back? What had we to lose? Nothing but our lives. Why did we not un away and hide? We might have had a chance to survive. Why did we walk deliberately and obediently into their clutches? I know why.…
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Beautiful Sentences: Tadeusz Borowski
“Save us. We are going to the gas chambers! Save us.” And they rode slowly past us—the ten thousand silent men—and then disappeared from sight. Not one of us made a move, not one of us lifted a hand. Tadeusz Borowski, “Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter)”
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Beautiful Sentences: Martha Gellhorn
You never even stopped to notice the dead; they weren’t men any more They lay along the roads, in the fields, in the streets of villages, under the trees, like old dirty laundry sacks, nothing, just dead. You never knew how much of nothing dying was until you saw the shapeless, nameless, meaningless dead. Martha…
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Beautiful Sentences: Marguerite Duras
In group photographs of the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, the murderer-members look to me as if they’re lonely in the same way as Rabier—the solitude of cholera victims, or worse, with moth-eaten souls, each loneliness its own disguise, its teeth chattering for fear of its neighbor, for fear of tomorrow’s execution.…