Sunday Sentence: Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart by Irmgard Keun

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Children are the bonny little blossoms in the moldering garden of life.

Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart by Irmgard Keun

Sunday Sentence: The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

The Western world is located somewhere between the Statue of Liberty and the pillar of salt.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin

Sunday Sentence: Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

       Wine in, truth out.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Sunday Sentence: Homie by Danez Smith

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

       someone dragged the screaming boy
       so deep into the woods he sounds like the trees now.

Homie by Danez Smith

Sunday Sentence: Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

       A flock of starlings alights in a tree and chatters,
       each a night of twinkling stars on its back, then
       the hush and inexplicable lighting out en masse,

       black whirlwind wheeling against blue, rippling
       like breeze-ruffled trees, the path of prayers,
       searching before coming down to light again.

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill

Sunday Sentence: Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

       Lord, I wish I knew what ails me. If I was good
       enough to be a dog I’d lose my bark.

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill

Sunday Sentence: I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott

Simply put, the best sentence(s)* I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without** commentary.

If you met him, you would want to marry him. But you can’t, because I already did.

*     *     *

When I am packing a suitcase and I’ve crammed every last rectangle of folded clothing into the bag and added shoes, makeup, a just-in-case-it’s-cold cardigan and a panicked last-minute backup outfit or two, and I’m mashing everything down as hard as I can, and I go from zero to psycho in a second because I can’t get the bag zipped, and I’m stomping on the bag and hammering at it with my fists, he calmly opens it, rearranges a few things, and zips it.

I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott

*I chose three. Sue me.

**I am breaking the rules this week, but I can’t resist commenting on how rich with humor both of these selections are: the first with a sort of snap-snap feel to it, and the second has an admirable momentum that should be used as an example of How to Write a Long Tightly-Coiled Sentence in writing classrooms. I mean, tear it apart and count the syllables and breath-beats to marvel at how MLP turns the first part of the sentence into luggage itself, full of details and hyphenated adjectives and verbs like crammed and mashing and stomped and then see how her husband comes in and acts as the zipper, closing the sentence with neat efficiency. Zzzzzip! Now that’s how you sentence, people!

Sunday Sentence: The Wasp Eater by William Lychack

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

At the bottom of everything, they were a family of silence—nothing but blind, black, coal-crumbling silence, his father never anchored or steady like his mother, his mother never sanguine or loose like his father.

The Wasp Eater by William Lychack

Sunday Sentence: The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

In war, as in farming, topography was fate.

The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson

Sunday Sentence: Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

       It grows dark quickly here,
       and God no longer strolls
       the gardens, calling out
       the name of things with delight;
       not even the damp clump
       of a name.

“Transplant” in Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Sunday Sentence: Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

In truth, I have been reprimanded by my own guilt / for how easily have I silenced the noises of a world entering the terror of a dictatorship, / how I have pretended that in time it will pass—how I have carried in me the hope in / a constitution that says in another five years, the terrible order will change— / a kind of jubilee and yet I know that I am ignoring the bones scattered in the wake / of this horror, the deaths, the losses, the wounds, the debilitating wounds that will not heal; / how a generation of infants will have learned that the adults are allowed to sulk and scowl / in tantrums and no one is bold enough to do much about it—how the secret of the adult / is that we live in compromise each day, we seek our pleasures at the expense of others, / and this is enough for us as long as we remain silent.

from “Bones” in Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Sunday Sentence: Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

       This is a ritual of sin: after clearing a long
       path, behind me the pox of snow returns.

from “How I Became an Apostle” in Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Sunday Sentence: “Anyone Can Do It” by Manuel Munoz

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Sundays were always so peaceful, Delfina thought, no matter where you were, so serene she imagined the birds themselves had gone dumb.

from “Anyone Can Do It” by Manuel Munoz in
Best American Short Stories 2019

Sunday Sentence: Edison by Edmund Morris

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

The revolution Edison had wrought was so unobtrusive and at the same time so world changing that few, if any, of the people who experienced it realized what had happened: an end to the counterbalance of night and day that had obtained for all of human history, mocking the attempts of torchbearers and lamplighters and gas companies to alter it with their puny waves of flame.

Edison by Edmund Morris

Sunday Sentence (Special Grandson Edition): Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

NOTE: Content has been a little thin at the Pen lately. There’s a very good reason for that: I’ve just spent the last week in North Carolina where I was incredibly blessed and lucky to witness the birth of my first grandchild, a healthy, happy, cute-as-a-button little lad named Ludo. Four days later, with my new best friend tucked in the crook of my arm like a swaddled butternut squash, I asked his mother (my daughter) to reach over to the nearby bookshelf for one of the books I’d brought with me from Montana. And then, clearing my throat, I proceeded to read Ludo his first book, a real classic. (That’s my wife holding the book in this picture―yeah, we may have politely fought for “baby time” during our visit.) These are two of my favorite sentences from those pages...

He didn’t want to get lost in the woods. So he made a very small forest, with just one tree in it.

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

Sunday Sentence: Plot It Yourself by Rex Stout

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Squab marinated in light cream, rolled in flour seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, clove, thyme, and crushed juniper berries, sautéed in olive oil, and served on toast spread with red currant jelly, with Madeira cream sauce poured over it, is one of Wolfe’s favorite tidbits.

Plot It Yourself by Rex Stout

Sunday Sentence: So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

You kiss me with the deliberateness of carefully pouring acid from one beaker to another―the slightest mistake and we could have a Situation.

"Dandelion Light" from So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith

Sunday Sentence: So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Billie Holiday is singing and singing and singing, her dusty paper-flower voice echoing off the tiled walls.

"Home Safe" from So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith

Sunday Sentence: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

The sun gleamed chilly silver.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

Sunday Sentence: So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Reminded him of that morning after church when her hair was baptism-wet. How she sat at the kitchen table, born again, drowning in the sunlight.

"Knock Out the Heart Lights So We Can Glow" from
So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith