#perfect sentences

[believethebird]

it’s you who are whatever a moon has always meant

e.e. cummings

[etal-late]

How to write the perfect sentence

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?

OK OK OK Joe, there’s a lot of good advice here. But I can show you fic writers who can write their characters in sentences as clean as a bone, and they bone.

[elizabethkiem]

There was a piano being murdered in the room on the left.

-Roddy Doyle

[believethebird]

I've loved you all day.

Anne Michaels, from “Depth of Field” in The Weight of Oranges

[believethebird]

The morning we left, the sky was a slurless blue

Robert Macfarlane

[ladylazaru]

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.

James Joyce, Dubliners

[temporarilyeuropean]

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

William Faulkner, Light in August

Though this quote has of course been floating around in my head for about 8 years, I don't think I ever grasped it—or understood how turning verbs into subjects might explode prose—until last night.

[nevar23]

He is a man without a past sailing in a strange sea in a world where the stars have come loose in the firmament.

~From "S", JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst