Stuff I've dug up.
To make sure I wasn't being too hasty with the 44 books I decided to remove from my library and donate to the book drive at work, I determined to give each volume one last chance. One by one, I opened them to page 123 (or page 23 if the book had fewer than 123 pages) and read the first full sentence. I remember hearing once that when you're browsing at the bookstore or library, you should read that particular sentence to ascertain whether a book is worth reading. So I figured I would apply this very scientific process to the task of determining whether a book was worth keeping. Here are the sentences I found the most tempting:
“You like to fricasseed a bunch of my boys the other day.”
--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
The upshot of this was he wasn’t afraid, even with this monstrous dog staring him down. --Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (trans. by Philip Gabriel)
And her doctor, he told . . .
he explain to me
that the bullet
destroyed the placenta
and went through
me
and she caught it in her arms.
--Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
The camp was a fever hospital, the suffering beyond experience. --Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison
The distinction between eroticized male friendship and sodomy turned on cultural rather than exclusively sexual criteria. --David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe
Two Places have been agreed to be divided between them, namely the Church and the Play-House; where they segregate themselves from each other in a remarkable Manner: for as the People of Fashion exalt themselves at Church over the Heads of the People of no Fashion; so in the Play-House they abase themselves in the same degree under their Feet. --Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews [at some point I evidently found this sentence worthy of underlining]
Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes . . .
But every now and then, just weighing in
Is what it must come down to, and without
Any self-exculpation or self-pity.
--Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level
And as Mr. Potter walked toward Mr. Shoul and Mr. Shoul’s garage where five cars were waiting for five drivers and Mr. Potter was one of them, small drops of moisture, no bigger than the head of a pin, almost invisible really, gathered in the pit of his arms, in the small crevices of his body, between his toes, on the nape of his neck, behind the lobes of his ear, in the small hidden lines over which the fleshy part of his nose furled, and down his strong calves and down his strong shins and his arms too, and Mr. Potter did not feel uncomfortable; and then a soft breeze blew against his cheek and blew through his entire body and the small drops of moisture evaporated and Mr. Potter did not feel that he had been uncomfortable; and the soft breeze that blew against his body had once been a violent wind which had wreaked so much havoc somewhere far away form the world which Mr. Potter was in just then. --Jamaica Kincaid, Mr. Potter
Let the God who is maker of bats watch with them in their unclean corners.
--DH Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers!
A little tongue of hellfire licks at our heels and the MG jumps ahead, roaring like a bomber through the sandy pine barrens and across Bay St. Louis. --Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Fancy going and getting married to a fallen woman for three hundred miserable dollars! --Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays (trans. by James McFarlane and Jens Arup)
In the end, though, I saved none of these. I did, however, rescue The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty because I remembered it has some good stuff on funerals, and also Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio's memoir about having Alzheimer's, because of this, the devastating last paragraph of the book:
I must now wait for the silence to engulf me and take me to the place where there is no memory left and there remains no reflexive will to live. It is lonely here waiting for memory to stop and I am afraid and tired. Hug me, Joyce, and then let me sleep.
[As it happens, DeBaggio died earlier this year.]
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