Perfect Sentences

Reasons why I'm grateful that I work from home: You guys, it's -3 degrees outside. We got 15 inches of snow yesterday. IT IS MADNESS. I saw someone cross country skiing down my street yesterday. (It looked like fun, should I take up cross country skiing?!) I don't have any snow boots, so I'm stuck at home until the UPS guy shows up to bring the pair I ordered from Zappos. So it's a little bit like I'm on house arrest in Switzerland, like Roman Polanski. Only, you know, my apartment isn't a ski chalet. Oh, right, and I'm not a fugitive rapist.

But the weather isn't what I want to talk about today. Nor is the ongoing Polanski brouhaha. Today I want to talk about sentences that really, really, really work. The kind I like to underline while I read.

What makes them work? Honestly, I don't really know. Or, rather, it's different for each one. It's a combination of so many factors: The idea the sentence is communicating, the context of the sentence and its place in the larger story being told, the specific words used, the sounds those words make, and the way they feel in your mouth if you read them aloud. Alliteration, metaphor, a striking image. Sometimes just the simplicity of the sentence can be moving.

I have several examples underlined in the books on my shelf, but I want to give just one to start this conversation. It's from Derek Nikitas's The Long Division, which I read (the first half of) in October, and I still have this sentence stuck in my head.

Context: Jodie has just been in a car accident, and she's fleeing the scene with her teenage son (whom she gave up for adoption at birth). Events are spinning out of her control (if they were ever really in her control to begin with), and it's icy cold and punishing. Jodie's been hurt in the wreck -- not life-threateningly, but significantly. I see in this sentence not only Jodie's injury (her face is cut open), but her inadequate power and abilities in the face of an unforgiving, harsh world. In this sentence, I know that Jodie and Cal's journey will not end well, and my heart breaks for them:

"The wind was so ruthless it widened her wounds."

Do you see what I mean? It's perfect.

Ok, I'll give you one more of my underlined examples, this one from Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know. The context here is Kay, the social worker helping the woman claiming to be one of the missing Bethany sisters, is watching her eleven year old son prepare his afternoon snack. He's talking to himself, and he says,

"Oreos, real Oreos, because you can't fake Oreos. And here is the milk, low-fat, Giant brand, because milk is milk. Yesssssss!"

That dialog rang so true to me -- I could see my sister having the same conversation with herself at some snacktime in our past -- that it's stuck with me for two years, and I'm sure will be embedded in my brain for years to come. "Milk is milk," a perfect snapshot of a childhood mid-afternoon.

So, what about you? I'd love to hear the sentences you underline.

[Update from last week's post: Princess has pretty much given up stove-sitting, though now she's mad at me because I put up that plastic filmy stuff on the windows to stop the drafts, and she can no longer sit on the sill in the kitchen. Though watching her try to jump up onto the sill only to be faced with a thin, clear plastic barrier was kinda funny. Also, my sister Beth, who is incredibly talented and funny, memorialized the cat-on-fire incident in comic form. Note page two of the comic, in which she describes the time our youngest sister, Rachel, used a new pair of scissors on the family cat's fur. What is wrong with us?!]

Comments

[Keli Scrapchansky]

From Covet, J.R. Ward "And the furniture...Christ, the sofas and chairs looked like jewelry with all of their gold leafing and gemstone-colored silk." I would have underlined it if it wasn't a library book because I thought it was a perfect description, like jewelry. The one word said it all.

Glad to hear Princess has recovered physically and emotionally.