Sentences I Like

Up close the three men were a small anthology of body odors. (The Believers)


It was 1953, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. (The Bell Jar)


It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in a possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife. (Pride and Prejudice)


So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (The Great Gatsby)


If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  (Catcher in the Rye)


First, the colors.
  Then the humans.
  That's usually how I see things.
  Or at least I try.  (The Book Thief)

All warfare is based on deception. (The Art of War)

It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. 
(The Little Prince)


"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)


Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori  (Wilfred Owen 1918)


                         Goodnight, sweet prince
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. (Hamlet)