Favorite Sentence: Joan Didion's Blue Nights

"I could give the name of whichever close friend in New York comes first to mind, but the close friend in New York who comes first to mind is actually, on reflection, not even in New York, out of town, out of the country, away, certainly unreachable in the best case, possibly unwilling in the worst." (page 186)

Favorite Sentence: M. Ageyev's Novel With Cocaine

"My experience in matters of love seemed to have convinced me that no one could talk eloquently of love unless his love was only a memory, that no one could talk persuasively of love unless his sensuality was aroused, and no one whose heart was actually in the throes of love could say a word." (page 93)

Favorite Sentence: Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

"It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream."

Favorite Sentence: Samuel Beckett's Molloy

"But already the day is over, the shadows lengthen, the walls multiply, you hug the walls, bowed down like a good boy, oozing with obsequiousness, having nothing to hide, hiding from mere terror, looking neither right nor left, hiding but not provocatively, ready to come out, to smile, to listen, to crawl, nauseating but not pestilent, less rat than toad." (page 90)

Favorite Sentence: Timothy Egan's The Big Burn

"In that sense, lodgepole was like the Pacific salmon that made their way to the Continental Divide on the Idaho-Montana border--giving it up at death, in the high Rockies, for the next generation." (page 113)

Favorite Sentence: Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad

"The cold spasms in the scars on your wrists." (page 191)

Favorite Sentence: Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist

"But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end." (page 126)