Category: writing
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Beautiful sentences
Every year I tell my BU undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is preprofessional—preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is more personal—finding big questions worth asking, which is to say questions that cannot be answered in a semester, or…
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Beautiful sentences
There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles. Ann Patchett, State of Wonder.
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Beauiful sentences
I found the notion of a religion designed to humble the proud thrilling. I also loved the Quran’s habit of the question—“Do you not understand?” (2:44); “Have you not seen?” (31:20)—despite the fact, because of the fact, that these questions were rarely answered. Stephen Prothero, God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World.
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Beautiful sentences
Never losing the drive to get them ready for the cold hard world that they will someday attempt to join and that will, in the end reject them. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.
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Beautiful sentences
He had read somewhere once that different kinds of smiles came from different parts of the brain, that a genuine smile, a smile of real pleasure, came from one site, and a polite smile, a smile only intended to signal pleasure, came from another. This smile came from there, that other part. Susan Miller, The Lake Shore Limited.
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Beautiful sentences
Barnes & Noble is a burning testament to man’s desire to do his shopping in large, pulsing chain stores. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.
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Divagate
I’m always conscious of the words that appear in the books I read, looking for those words which I don’t know. I’ve had the word “divagate” in my list of interesting words for a while, long enough that I forget where it came from. I found two definitions for the word. A literal meaning of…
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Beautiful Sentences
Gabriel looks back at him from the mirror, the man he’s made, and made his own, the man whose grief drinks from his own grief, whose joy eats his joy, but whom he uses, over and over, to escape his grief and joy, to make them commodity, currency. For better or for worse—he doesn’t know—to make…
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Beautiful sentences
Books and film. Music. These are the things we obsess over so we don’t have to deal with real life. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.