Sunday Sentence: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Sunday Sentence highlights the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, out of context and without commentary.

"Sunil thought that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly - the kind that could be ended as Kalu's had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he'd come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy's life could still matter to himself."

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
by Katherine Boo
Random House, 2012

Sunday Sentence: Stoner by John Williams

Sunday Sentence highlights the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, out of context and without commentary.

"Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time in life he had to read so much, to learn what he had to know."

Stoner
by John Williams
page 26

Sunday Sentence: The Age of Innocence

Sunday Sentence highlights the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, out of context and without commentary.

"What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?'

The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
page 40

Sunday Sentence: Flight Behavior

Sunday Sentence highlights the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, out of context and without commentary.

"He'd said good night as if they were friends parting ways, then rolled to his side and slept the sleep of a mountain range while she stared at the black air, dividing the river of her desperation into rivulets until some of them seemed navigable." 

Flight Behavior
by Barbara Kinssolver
Loc 6538 (85%)

Sunday Sentence: Hotel du Lac

Sunday Sentence highlights the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, out of context and without commentary.

"The beautiful day had within it the seeds of its own fragility: it was the last day of summer."

Hotel du Lac
by Anita Brookner
page 67

Sunday Sentence: The Woman Upstairs

Sunday Sentence, inspired by author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, highlights the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, out of context and without commentary.

"Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying - valiantly, fruitlessly - to eradicate."

The Woman Upstairs
by Claire Messud
page 88

Sunday Sentence: The Other Typist

Sunday Sentence, inspired by author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, is "simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary."

"After all, summer was over. It had abandoned us, leaving behind a feeling of dissatisfaction, and taking with it all those too oft unfulfilled beach-day aspirations of a brown-skinned, primitive freedom."  

The Other Typist
by Suzanne Rindell
(page 308)

Sunday Sentence: And the Mountains Echoed

Sunday Sentence, inspired by author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, is "simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary."

Father never felt more present to Abdullah, more vibrant, revealed, more truthful, than when he told his stories, as though they were pinholes into his opaque, inscrutable world.   (page 31)

And the Mountains Echoed
by Khaled Hosseini

Sunday Sentence: The Thirteenth Tale

Sunday Sentence, inspired by author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, is "simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary."

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield

Saturday's Sentence

I ran across an interesting post last weekend at Lynne's Book Notes. She says, "Author David Abrams has started a marvelous idea on his blog, The Quivering Pen. Each Sunday, he posts, without explanation, the best sentence he has read during the week."

Isn't that a great idea? As luck would have it, there is  a single sentence that really stood out in my reading this week. And since it happens to be about food, I'm linking up to Weekend Cooking, too.

"While the Burgesses seemed to have no knowledge of, or interest in, food (there were meals of scrambled hamburger covered with an unmelted sheet of orange cheese, or a tuna casserole made with canned soup, or a chicken roasted without any spices, not even salt), Pam discovered that they loved baked goods, and so she made banana bread and sugar cookies, and sometimes Susan stood in the small kitchen and helped her, and whatever was baked was eaten hungrily, and this touched Pam as well - as though these kids had been starved all their lives for sweetness."

The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
page 107

Weekend Cooking, hosted at Beth Fish Reads, is open to anyone who has a food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up over the weekend.