Saturday, November 14, 2009

Sentences

I just finished reading _The Corrections_ by Jonathan Franzen. Here are some of my favourite sentences:

p7 "It's the fate of most Ping Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games."

p98 "Rationally Chip knew that Doug would let him go soon and that eventually he might even escape the Nightmare of Consumption and find a restaurant bathroom where he could take the filet out and regain his full critical faculties - that there would come a moment when he was no longer standing amid pricey gelati with lukewarm fish in his pants, and that this future moment would be a moment of extraordinary relief - but for now he still inhabited an earlier, much less pleasant moment from the vantage point of which a new brain looked like just the ticket."

p425 "Not until she was at the pier and her mother kissed her and a quite different Denise, a Version 5.0, nearly put her tongue in the pretty old woman's mouth, nearly ran her hands down Enid's hips and thighs, nearly caved in and promised to come at Christmas for as long as Enid wanted, did the extent of the correction she was undergoing reveal itself."

p485 "If a perky, homely evangelical girl insisted on talking, he had a right to choose the topic."

p 541 "Denise's shampoo had the pleasing, subtle scents of late-model Western capitalism."

There you go, Coyote...

5 comments:

coyote said...

Thank you ma'am! Those are savoury phrases indeed.

I've heard on good authority that crokinole boards often suffer fates similar to those of pingpong tables...

Jen G said...

this is true... but are they immortalized in song as well as literature? Salon Sally's lament for her childhood home comes to mind.

Hannah said...

Wow! I wish I could write like that! :)

Anonymous said...

Ah, lukewarm fish in the pants...that takes me back...

Jen G said...

Hi Hannah - more and more, I find that I look for well-crafted sentences in my recreational reading. It's a true art form.

Hi XUP, whassup? Glad you appreciated the lukewarm fish sentence, hope the memories are less dire than the circumstance.