Last month, I came across a link to an article on Buzzfeed that was a collection of reader-submitted suggestions for what are the best sentences in literature, and what can I say, curiosity got the better of me so I clicked through knowing all the while that I’d be disappointed. It’s inevitable from such lists. I figured there’d be a few great lines, a few good ones, and a few that I could take or leave because when I see that phrase, “51 best sentences” I’m looking not just for meaning, but for beauty, phrasing, style. I want the sentences in such a list to scream with passion and drip with goodness. I want them to shine a light on something I hadn’t seen before or to remind me yet again of something I already knew in a way that is still fresh.
Maybe I have unrealistic standards, but that’s what I aim for in my own writing. There’s the story of course, but every once in a while I want the reader to stop in their tracks and exclaim, “Wow!” before rereading a bit and maybe even folding over the corner of the page to mark its place, to find it again, to be wowed again. I don’t know if I’ll ever be successful in that regard, but I’ll keep trying, and well, some reviews of The Music Book have quoted certain lines so maybe I have succeeded on a minor level. It’s a nice thought, but to look at my bookshelf, there are a number of authors who have succeeded in a far greater way. I can pick a number of titles and find pages with the corners bent, and rereading the words on those pages never fails to move me. Time and again, I’ve done it, but with me it’s more often the paragraph or at least a part of a paragraph that wows me because it has context. Some of the lines in the Buzzfeed article don’t mean much on their own. Take number five for instance, a line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Maybe it is, but I don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s been too long since I read the book, and for all I remember the preceding moments of the story could have been talking about how matadors kill bulls and the way the animals bleed out a lovely shade of crimson right there in front of the cheering crowd. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Oh, I know that isn’t it, but what I’m getting at is that often those sentences that wow us do so because of what came before. There’s the build up, a few details, maybe some repetition, and then BAM! The line comes with a force. It’s a few body blows and little bit of footwork, and then the knockout punch and the seeing of stars.
It’s my thought then to share some passages that have moved me, excerpts from books I love, books that I have in all cases read more than once, books that will remain on my bookshelf for the remainder of my days. I’ll share ten of these, and hopefully, they might inspire you to delve a little deeper into the books from whence they came.
10. We’ll start things off with a bit from Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant – Writing from Within. It’s a non-fiction book, his account of a writer’s life, something in the vein of Stephen King’s On Writing. Swift is one of my favorite authors, and one of his books, Last Orders, is on my top ten list of books that have influenced me. The quote here is Swift talking about writing, the why of writing, the feel of it:
“Often, on the bad days, I can think, ‘Am I really loving this?’But I do love it and I hope that I write with love. And on the wonderful days, when it goes like it should go, when you know that what you’ve just written you will never have to change, it’s more than that. It makes you feel that everything is worthwhile. The possibility on any day of having that feeling is by itself the perfect reason for doing it. It makes you feel in touch with life and the world; it makes you know why you are here.”
I so get that line about realizing you will not have to change something. All writers know that feeling. On some nights, when it’s gone like that I’ll stand up and strut around my writing room full of energy and belief and life. There’ll be a few fist pumps, a few, “Hell, yeah’s!” It feels like the heavens have parted and that there’s a light shining down on all that is good in the world. On other nights, it’s a little more subdued. I’ll have written a line I love, a line I know will not change no matter how many edits the manuscript goes through, but rather than get up, I’ll open a beer, take a sip, and then just luxuriate in the words, let them wash over me. I’ll breathe easy and think that life is good and could not be any better. Swift is exactly right. “It makes you feel in touch with life and the world; it makes you know why you are here.”
