Last week Publishers Weekly rounded up five perfect sentences from literature (part 3!) on their Tumblr. Who among us hasn't come across a sublimely perfect sentence while reading a good book? Since I do most of my reading on an e-reader, I've begun taking photos of the perfect sentences I come across. Here's my most recent perfect line (okay, it's really three lines, but the last one stands on its own -- I just wanted to give you context!), from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible:
"I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could. My talents are different from those of the women who cleave and part from husbands nowadays--and my virtues probably unrecognizable. But look at old women and bear in mind we are another country."
Oh, it guts me every time.
Megan has come across two perfect lines recently, too:
- "I don't know if this is a happy ending, but here we are let loose in open fields." - Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
- “If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it." - Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
And here's one from Nadia:
- “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.” - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The beauty of perfect lines is that we never run out of them.
Have you come across perfect lines in literature? What are they?
