“Noises at twilight had a blurred sound, and they lingered: the slam of a screen door down the street, voices of children, the whir of a lawnmower from a yard somewhere.”
-Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
Beautiful Sentence #16 – #20 (or Beautiful Paragraph) ~ Ben Tanzer
“We were in the back of the station wagon, and I know you are supposed to keep your eyes closed, because that’s what Joe told me, and possibly a character played by Molly Ringwald, but I didn’t, and I rarely did. I liked to watch, and as we shifted into some kind of compromising position, the night was so very dark, the moon a million miles away, and, because we didn’t go to the actual drive-in, but instead parked behind it, it was so quiet, and there were no distractions, it was just us, only us, and I looked out the window and there it was, a ship of some kind, off above the car, hovering for a moment, glowing and cylindrical. I locked into it, and I looked for any signs that would make it anything but a UFO–numbers, logos, wings or a tail, a cockpit–but there wasn’t anything. It was a UFO, which I watched until it moved away, and then I lingered there for a moment, awaiting its return, something, anything, but there was nothing. It was ephemeral, and now it was just me and Natalie again, alone, the two of us, and nothing else.”
– Ben Tanzer, “Believe,” Be Cool
Beautiful Sentence #15 ~ Jack Driscoll
“And so go ahead and try following them across the stark, windswept pastures and fields of white moose and deer and coyote, and just see how long before you’re completely turned around out there where the spirit world is everywhere alive.” – Jack Driscoll, “That Story,” The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot
Beautiful Sentence #14 ~ Victor Hugo
“Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief.” – Letter to Edouard Thierry
Beautiful Sentence # 13 ~ Flannery O’Connor
“The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.” – Flannery O’Connor, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
Beautiful Sentence #12 ~ Alexandra Kleeman
“Even then I knew: whatever hollow I made in you if I left would heal up like a hole sunk into water, quick as water rushing to fill some passing wound.” – Alexandra Kleeman, “You, Disappearing,” Intimations
Beautiful Sentence #11 ~ Dennis McFadden
“The May sunshine was cold and sterile, contrary to everything God intended May to be, but then everything on the drive to Cranberry, the drive he’d made hundreds of times before, was foreign and unfamiliar, including his own heartbeat.” – Dennis McFadden, “Forget-Me-Nots,” Jimtown Road
10.10.2014 Journal Prompt
October 10, 2014: Her nickname was Sugar.
Beautiful Sentence #10 ~ Wesley McNair
“…And you, my brother,
though I have built the best house I can build for you
to stop at last and rest in, you go on running.”
-Wesley McNair, “My Brother Running”
Beautiful Sentence #9 ~ Tennessee Williams
“My grandmother formed quiet but deeply emotional attachments to places and people and would have been happy to stay forever and ever in one rectory, once her bedroom was papered in lemon yellow and the white curtains were hung there, once she had acquired a few pupils in violin and piano, but my grandfather always dreamed of movement and change, a dream from which he has not yet wakened in this ninety-sixth spring of his life.” -Tennessee Williams, “Grand”, from Collected Stories
Patricia Ann McNair 