10 Sentences I Wish I’d Written

Do thy worst old Time;
despite thy wrong, my love shall in my verse ever live young

(from Sonnet 19 by William Shakespeare)

Listen: imagination is all we have as defense against capture and its inevitable changes.

(Alexie, ‘Captivity’, D’Agata p297).

In the mind, words are heard bone-dry without the benefit of breath.

(Field, Thalia. “A [therefore] I”, D’Agata 420)

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

(from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams)

The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I’ve come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me.

(from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace)

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue— liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

(from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley)

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

(from 1984 by George Orwell, p32)

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

(Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner)

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

(from Light in August by William Faulkner)

”. . . and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words . . .“

(William Faulkner)