Favorite Sentence: Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary

" 'In time of peace prepare for war' has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end--that change is the one immutable and eternal law--but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth."

Favorite Sentence: Ania Ahlborn's Seed

"The screaming continued as they raced toward the girls' room, desperate to outrun one another, as if getting there first would prove who the better parent was."

Favorite Sentence: Curtis White's Memories of My Father Watching TV

"Welles's figural entry in a darkened Viennese doorway trails ghosts in its wake." (page 146)

Favorite Sentence: Stephen King's 11/22/63

"By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar's greatest weakness: calling hesitation research."

Favorite Sentence: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

" 'Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described--by Cocteau, I think--as 'a mirage of suspended gardens,' and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but--and now let me finish sweetly--we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau tenebreux the capacity of evoking 'human interest': it is there, it is there--maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there.' " (pages 161 - 162)

Favorite Sentence: Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air

"And the enviable peace of which he speaks eludes me." (page 353)

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)

Favorite Sentence: Philip Roth's Nemesis

"He filled his lungs with the harmless clean air of the Pocono Mountains, then bounded three steps forward, took off, and, in control of every inch of his body throughout the blind flight, did a simple swan dive into water he could see only the instant before his arms broke neatly through and he plumbed the cold purity of the lake to its depths."  (page 157)

Favorite Sentence: Richard Froude's Fabric (Horse Less Press)

"When I was younger, at school or church or somewhere, the teacher told us that if the phone rings in the night, it's rarely good news." (page 8)

Favorite Sentence: Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

"No, I’ll not say a word about it—here it is;—in publishing it—I have appealed to the world—and to the world I leave it;—it must speak for itself."

Favorite Sentence: Mathias Svalinas's I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mud Luscious Press)

"Even when your loved one has been dead for so long that the junk mail in his name has stopped arriving in the mailbox." (page 46)