Your favorite sentence (that you wrote or not)

tegeus-Cromis

tegeus-Cromis

a better poet than swordsman
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What is your favorite sentence that you wrote? Alternately, what is your favorite sentence that someone else wrote? Please post it here with no context whatsoever (other than author and title of book or story). The sentence, hopefully, will stand on its own based on its rhythm, its syntax, its sound.

Please post only one sentence, not a longer passage: that is to say, semicolons are fine, but more than one period (or exclamation point or question mark, unless used in dialogue quoted inside the sentence) is not. And only one sentence in a post, though you can post multiple times (we all have multiple favorite sentences, I'm sure). And if anybody does want to ask for the context, please do -- I just think the original sentence should first appear contextless.

(I realize I'm setting so many rules that this may sound like it belongs in the playroom forum. But I'm just thinking of the kind of thread I -- and hopefully some of you -- would enjoy reading.)
 
(And yes, I'm especially curious about your own sentences -- seeing what everyone thinks most successful in their own writing -- but I thought opening it up to sentences from other sources might make it an even more interesting thread.)
 
...I'm not sure I have a favorite sentence that I myself have written yet...I do have a few paragraphs/short scene descriptions that I like a lot though. :giggle: But I will spare everyone that extended verbiage!

Best first novel sentence of all time: "It was in the year 1514 that fate and my sins sent me into the world and thence to the court of the King of France, a very womb of intrigue from which no respectable English widow such as I was might hope to escape unscathed." - The Serpent Garden, Judith Merkle Riley
 
And so, Scout raged.

My second favorite from: Half-Breed... An 1870's Western Novel in Eleven Parts, by K2

K2
 
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

Horror's my favorite genre, and this is my favorite opening sentence from any genre. It's also part of my favorite opening, period, in any genre. From: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (as I am sure virtually everyone here will already know. :)).
 
"And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through the groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as laminae the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor - it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove."

From Peace, by Gene Wolfe
 
Elckerlyc said:
"And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through the groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as laminae the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor - it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove."

From Peace, by Gene Wolfe
Click to expand...
That's a fantastic sentence, and a good long one to boot.
 
My favourite sentence I wrote is this one. :D

On a serious note, I'm not sure I have one sentence of my own - maybe paragraphs or stories.

"It starts with love for foliage and ends in camouflage."

That sticks in my head, from the song Something Wicked (named from the Ray Bradbury novel) by British Sea Power.
 
Cat's Cradle said:
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

Horror's my favorite genre, and this is my favorite opening sentence from any genre. It's also part of my favorite opening, period, in any genre. From: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (as I am sure virtually everyone here will already know. :)).
Click to expand...
That reminds me so much of this article by Dr. Johnson: Sleep, The 'Idler' no. 32 by Samuel Johnson (November 1758)
It could almost be a quote from it.
 
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
Okay - Not original, but I can already feel all that is going to come...
 
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