Great Sentences

I love stones. I love noticing them, holding them, polishing a special one with my thumb, staring into its textures and colours and imagining how it came to be the way it is. It's a terrific exercise in humility, I find. Because the more you stare at a stone, the more incredible it becomes.

I also love sentences. I love noticing a particularly beautiful one when I'm reading a good book, holding it in my mouth as I say it aloud, taking a good look at its textures and colours, and trying to understand how it came to be what it is: a sentence worth learning from.

One of my favourites is the opening line of Patrick Lane's There is a Season (and yes, I go on and on about this book, but only because it's worth going on and on about):

"I stood alone among yellow glacier lilies and the windflowers of spring, the western anemone, their petals frail disks of trembling clotted cream."

It's not just a gorgeous poetic sculpture, it slides us right into the body of the narrator of this story, who is in a state of both reverence and trembling fragility. Genius.

This morning it was this one, from Ann Patchett's new book of essays, These Precious Days:

"Every human catastrophe the carpet in the hallway had endured over the years had been solved with a splash of bleach, which rendered it a long, abstract painting."

She could have just said, "the hallway was covered in bleach stains," but she made the extra effort (which is what all great sentences require) and turned a shabby hallway carpet into art.

Every good sentence has something to teach us about writing. We just need to make the effort to notice.