100 Beautiful Sentences

1. “Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or
blowing up a dam.”

– Michael Chabon

2. “Jack put his arm out the window, waving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street, and floated
away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through
their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage.”

– Marilynne Robinson

3. “A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens.”

– J.M. Ledger

4. “And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in
your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you
have done nothing to deserve it.”

– Paul Harding

5. “Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than
sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three
dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great grandmother to twins.”

– Edward P. Jones

6. “We were all a little drunk with spring, like the fat bees reeling from flower to flower, and a strange
insurrectionary current ran among us.”

– Tobias Wolff

8. “When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it
was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all — cash, booze, and a wife — he couldn’t be
distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.”

– Denis Johnson

9. “Lizards skit like quick beige sticks.”

– Richard Beard

10. “Saint Rufina, a famous woman who had been a very lovely young princess with long black hair who
decided to give up her jewelry and become a nun and wear only the roughest clothes, and who died in a terrible
way, by being eaten to death by wild dogs that ran through the church in the dead of wintertime, was in a special
chapel all to herself, where one arm of her was set aside, that someone had scooped up and saved from the dogs,
because everyone had loved her for her kindness and her healing ability.”

– Nicholson Baker

11. “I heard the sonic rip of a military jet, like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only
blue above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of sky.”

– Rachel Kushner

12. “The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

– Roberto Bolano

13. “His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten
everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up to him, their
bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.”

– Ann Patchett

14. “Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are
told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention.”

– Norman Rush

15. “We waited for the taxi beside the Holderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room
window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface
of the water, from one dark shore to the other.”

– W.G. Sebald

16. “On the ground, in the cave, now wrapped in darkness, they found themselves airborne over hills and
valleys, floating through blue clouds to the mountaintop of pure ecstasy, from where, suspended in space, they
felt the world go round and round, before they descended, sliding down a rainbow, toward the earth, their earth,
where the grass, plants, and animals seemed to be singing a lullaby of silence as Nyawira and Kamiti, now
locked in each other’s arms, slept the sleep of babies, the dawn of a new day awaiting.”

– Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

17. “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”

– Jose Saramago

18. “The Captain’s wife played the harp; she had very long arms, silver as eels on those nights, and armpits as
dark and mysterious as sea urchins; and the sound of the harp was sweet and piercing, so sweet and piercing it
was almost unbearable, and we were forced to let out long cries, not so much to accompany the music as to
protect our hearing from it.”

– Italo Calvino

19. “Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like
powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

20. “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there
are all the other places.”

– Alice Munro

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21. “The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”

Elena Ferrante

22. “In any case, at a certain point as she wandered out among the galaxies, among the whirling particles and
ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost.”

– Deborah Eisenberg

23. “And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.”
– Vladimir Nabokov

24. “In our world, that’s the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an
adult, the way it’s been put together is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you’re alone
in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.”

– Muriel Barbery

25. “Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales
hunting below, and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose sudden from the sea, white up top from bird
guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish.”

– Adam Johnson

27. “His fate had taken him off two trains this morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had
shown him the spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them people tethered by love, and habit, and
work, and meaning, tied into a meaning suddenly exploded, because contrary to all he had imagined, being tied,
being known, did not keep you safe.”

– Claire Messud

28. “He knows your name and you know his, and you almost killed him and, because you got so close to doing
so but didn’t, you want to fall on him, weeping, because you are so lonely, so lonely always, and all contact is
contact, and all contact makes us so grateful we want to cry and dance and cry and cry.”

– Dave Eggers

29. “They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.”

– Cynthia Ozick

30. “Everything was still bathed and saturated with her presence — higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in
optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions
of saints — not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame
leaping up in a dark room.”

– Donna Tartt
31. “We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into
and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if
caves.”

– Michael Ondaatje

32. “As she picked up her shoes from the closet and tiptoed from the room, she felt, for a vertiginous moment,
an unlawful excitement.”

– Paula Fox

33. “What I saw made me want to fell the highest spruce and watch it tip over and fall with a rush and a crash
that echoed through the valley and trim it myself in record time and strip it clean myself without stopping even
though that was the hardest thing to do and drag it to the river bank with my bare hands and my own back with
neither horse nor man to help me and heave it into the water with the strength I suddenly knew I had, and the
splash and the spray would rise as high as a house in Oslo.”

– Per Petterson

34. “He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be
discovered, that would rise one day to the light.”

– James Salter

35. “Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last—as if I were traveling in a
perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the
hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.”

– Joseph O’Neill

36. “And maybe I tried with too much mettle — my lines might have mentioned the “Latin gusto” of her calves
and hips in motion, and how the small blond hairs of her nape quelled my fear of becoming a “non crooning
castrato” — because not four days after I posted the letter she arrived at the prison wearing an orange autumn
dress, the strapless kind that could reverse a vasectomy.”

– William Giraldi

38. “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them,
and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and
soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is
deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

– Jeffrey Eugenides

39. “He’d say “I love you” to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-
ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts
around everyone’s soul.”

– Ben Fountain

40. “I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their
stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn’s rings.”

– Karen Russell

41. “Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to
find: small wonders where they grow.”

– Barbara Kingsolver

42. “Around the beginning of this century, the Queen of Thailand was aboard a boat, floating along with her
many courtiers, manservants, maids, feet-bathers, and food tasters, when suddenly the stern hit a wave and the
queen was thrown overboard into the turquoise waters of the Nippon-Kai, where, despite her pleas for help, she
drowned, for not one person on that boat went to her aid.”

– Zadie Smith

43. “Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation
and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.”

– Jamaica Kincaid

44. “As my grandfather went, arm over arm, his heart making sour little shudders against his ribs, he kept
listening for a sound, the sound of the tiger, the sound of anything but his own feet and lungs.”

– Tea Obreht

45. “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

– Iris Murdoch

46. “We all owe death a life.”

– Salman Rushdie

47. “In the deep gloom he could see the electric white gashes where the water boiled over the boulders.”

– Ron Carlson

48. “We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh.”
– Michel Faber

49. “Profound was Gary’s relief the next morning as he bumped and glided, like a storm-battered yacht, into the
safe harbor of his work week.”

– Jonathan Franzen

50. “Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles
and pimples, then the shadings.”

– Margaret Atwood

51. “I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am
wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air,
whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its
imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.”

– Annie Dillard

52. “Coming out into the late night and walking round the building with the secretive grating roll of the stony
path beneath his steps, the evening throbbed back through him as blood thumps slowly, reliving effort, after
exertion.”

– Nadine Gordimer

53. “Sometimes, when she’s out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate
were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that
nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.”

– T.C. Boyle

55. “Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface
planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

– Anthony Doerr

56. “Two weeks later, the tape arrived of the race and I memorized it, especially those last hundred yards,
Wowie alone, heading for the finish line, his body rhythmically stretching and contracting as his four legs
reached and folded, reached and folded.”

– Jane Smiley

57. “He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was
half naked, it was dawn and he loved her.”
– Mark Helprin

58. “At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not
want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”

– Lydia Davis (have you ever seen such a beautiful sentence that hinges on tense alone?)

59. “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of
faith alone.”

– Wendell Berry

60. “Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to
drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.”

– Sam Lipsyte

61. “And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything,
just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment,
it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away
into the night.”

– Kazuo Ishiguro

62. “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.”

– Barry Hannah

63. “We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore
whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it
was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.”

– Jonathan Safran Foer

64. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

– Jack Kerouac

65. “Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless
pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.”

– Arundhati Roy

66. “The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across
the cosmos — the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert

67. “Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of
sunset upon their shoulders.”
– Peter Matthiessen

68. “But it goes from bad to worse, and the moment he sets foot in Black’s room, he feels everything go dark
inside him, as though the night were pressing through his pores, sitting on top of him with a tremendous weight,
and at the same time his head seems to be growing, filling with air as though about to detach itself from his
body and float away.”

– Paul Auster

69. “They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling,
that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you always expanding to
encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d
ever—”

– George Saunders

70. “Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims,
hallucinations and all around assholery.”

– Thomas Pynchon

72. “The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange
planet and many sullen moons — it was systemic and it was complete.”

– Gary Shteyngart

73. “The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed
against the rooftops.”

– Jonathan Lethem

74. “Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he
might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

– Colum McCann

75. “For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider,
and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”

– Colm Toibin
76. “But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the
world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.”

– Emily St. John Mandel (a finalist for beautiful sentences, more like poetry than prose)

77. “Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but
something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own
terms.”

– Edwidge Danticat

78. “There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

79. “But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another
intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other
reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”

– Marlon James

80. “His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the
immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.”

– E.L. Doctorow

81. “Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with
annihilation.”

– J.M. Coetzee

82. “The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off
an odor of almonds.”

– Annie Proulx

83. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room,
and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”

– Ian McEwan

84. “And even if I recognized her strategy, her sneak attack, I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would
fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone
quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.”

– Amy Tan

85. “Every person had a star, every star had a friend, and for every person carrying a star there was someone
else who reflected it, and everyone carried this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.”

– Orhan Pamuk
86. “Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.”

– Daniel Alarcon

87. “Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.”

– Hilary Mantel

89. “We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional
lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in – a way to signal
those lies that could be more accurately described as dreams.”

– Rivka Galchen

90. “She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is
only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.”

– Peter Carey

91. “The road ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills
and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way.”

– Flann O’Brien

92. “We had loving beautiful sex just as soon as we could get ourselves to stop talking — loving and beautiful
in the expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was loving and beautiful even if it
was full of hamsters ready to kill each other on sight, but only when they’re awake.”

– Nell Zink

93. “And we know, until they stop their terrible motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into
the walls, until they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all we can do.”

– Nathan Englander

94. “He was still a handsome man, with a tanned, chiseled face and long, thick, wavy white hair, but his cells
had begun to reproduce in a haphazard fashion, destroying the DNA of neighboring cells and secreting toxins
into his body.”
– Michel Houellebecq

95. “You’re an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night
like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you
have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”

– Joyce Carol Oates

96. “In fact, this particular memory is one she’ll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after
Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat,
eyes sparking, shyly learning to dance.”

– Jennifer Egan

97. “Twenty were jammed together on the stoop, tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested
along the banisters, a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach.”

– Leonard Michaels

98. “It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we
suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my
foibles.”

– Jim Harrison

99. “Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of
who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down
the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his
present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.”

– Jesmyn Ward

100. “So, as was often the case when he was alone and sober, whatever the surroundings, he saw a boy pushing
his entrails back in, holding them in his palms like a fortune-teller’s globe shattering with bad news; or he heard
a boy with only the bottom half of his face intact, the lips calling mama.”

现在的我 快三十的我
除了感情 其他的 不论好坏 算是安定了
而感情这件事
我想努力 但我知道努力不来
我也着急 但着急也没有用
那顺其自然吧
可是圈子还是这个圈子 人还是这些人
恐怕是一年后 十年后也如今日
放弃太早 恋爱太老
有时候 遇上一个人 好像动心了
自己也不会主动 没有二十岁的不顾一切
没有勇气去表明 就算在喜欢 也只是自己默默知道
偷偷知道对方被牵手
自己悄悄难过 看起来心如止水 却好像难以呼吸
也有时候 遇上一个人呢 好像很喜欢自己
他又不是自己想找的
又自己一个人暗自伤感 悲哀
这个年纪 到底哪里出了问题
苦笑不得

生活中的朋友各自忙碌 每个人看起来都过的很体面
晒吃晒喝晒旅行晒趣事 但 他们究竟过得怎么样
虽是朋友 却有事说事 很少聊聊心深处的感受
好想大家深深接受了对方过得真好的状态
突然难过 此时孤单 这种一时的情绪无从说起
这些字眼 说出来也都变成了矫情
于是 自己慢慢消化所有 然后变成了习惯
于是习惯了一个人
而人总是太脆弱 总是需要一点支撑
于是便四处寻找一个抒发情感的人
到处走动到一个可以接纳所谓矫情的情绪的地方
和陌生人说着最真的话