"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“The sound of the ash bat making contact with the ball reaches Cotter Martin in the left-field stands, where he sits in a bony-shouldered hunch.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld
In today’s Anatomy of a Sentence, we explore sound and its ability to connect disparate people. Alongside a memorable sentence from Underworld, we look at passages in Lolita and Madame Bovary.
Whatever you believe about reading, you know the ways that great sentences stay with us. They’re the ones that we find ourselves repeating as we walk down the street on a Wednesday afternoon long after the book has gathered dust on the shelf. The ones we underline or copy into a notebook for some future purpose we can’t name. The ones that send a charge up our spines.
We begin our new series Anatomy of a Sentence with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and our favorite third sentence.
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
