Three Sentences I Love

The other day I was reading a short story on Fifty-Two Stories, and a line jumped off the page and slapped me in the face. It was that good. I haven’t read a sentence like this in a long time:

He’d dated since Nora’s death—two or three times, all setups that ended comfortably but without event—and he’d seen women on TV who struck him as sexy, arousing him so abruptly that he felt almost hijacked.

The line is from the story “Good Girl” by Holly Goddard Jones (the link above leads to the story).

Of course, the idea of “brilliant sentences/lines” is completely relative, but despite that, I thought I’d share two other amazing sentences I’ve noted in the last year:

My St. Martin’s Roget’s Thesaurus obligingly offers up fifteen synonyms for coition…and an impressive twenty-eight descriptors for genitalia, though again some of these are obscure. In a scene where lingam meets yoni, I’m not even sure who I’m rooting for.

That’s Barbara Kingsolver, “A Forbidden Territory Familiar to All.”

I lived in the cheapest student housing, a building that reeked of disinfectant. The moldy showers wept so slowly over your body that it took half an hour to get the soap off.

Louise Erdrich, “Beauty Stolen from Another World”

What are some of your favorite lines?

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