Most Beautiful Words In English

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jiataifeng
Posts: 178
Joined: 30 Apr 2009 06:31

Most Beautiful Words In English

Post by jiataifeng » 16 Sep 2018 22:49

Aquiver: Quivering, trembling.
Mellifluous: A sound that is sweet and smooth, pleasing to hear.
Ineffable: Too great to be expressed in words.
Hiraeth: A homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was.
Nefarious: Wicked, villainous, despicable.
Somnambulist: A person who sleepwalks.
Epoch: A particular period of time in history or a person's life.
Sonorous: An imposingly deep and full sound.
Serendipity: The chance occurrence of events in a beneficial way.
Limerence: The state of being infatuated with another person.
Bombinate: To make a humming or buzzing noise.
Ethereal: Extremely delicate, light, not of this world.
Illicit: Not legally permitted.
Petrichor: The pleasant, earthy smell after rain.
Iridescent: Producing a display of rainbowlike colours.
Epiphany: A moment of sudden revelation.
Supine: Lying face upwards.
Luminescence: Light products by chemical, electrical, or physiological means.
Solitude: a state of seclusion or isolation.
Aurora: dawn.
Syzygy: an alignment of celestial bodies.
Phosphenes: the light and colours produced by rubbing your eyes.
Oblivion: the state of being unaware of what is happening around you.
Ephemeral: lasting for a very short time.
Incandescence: light produced by high temperatures.
Denouement: the resolution of a narrative.
Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
Eloquence: the art of using language in an apt, fluent way.
Defenestration: the act of throwing someone out of a window.
Sonder: the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
Effervescence: bubbles in a liquid.
Cromulent: appearing legitimate but actually being spurious.

jiataifeng
Posts: 178
Joined: 30 Apr 2009 06:31

Re: Most Beautiful Words In English

Post by jiataifeng » 16 Sep 2018 22:49

Ailurophile A cat-lover.
Assemblage A gathering.
Becoming Attractive.
Beleaguer To exhaust with attacks.
Brood To think alone.
Bucolic In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant Like a cat’s eye.
Comely Attractive.
Conflate To blend together.
Cynosure A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance A brief love affair.
Demesne Dominion, territory.
Demure Shy and reserved.
Denouement The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude Disuse.
Desultory Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous Filmy.
Dissemble Deceive.
Dulcet Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent Bubbly.
Efflorescence Flowering, blooming.
Elision Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir A good potion.
Eloquence Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient A softener.
Ephemeral Short-lived.
Epiphany A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile At one time, for a time.
Ethereal Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative Suggestive.
Fetching Pretty.
Felicity Pleasantness.
Forbearance Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious Fleeting.
Furtive Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour Beauty.
Gossamer The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk
Halcyon Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue To infuse, instill.
Incipient Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue A naïve young woman.
Inglenook A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance Blithe nonchalance.
Inure To become jaded.
Labyrinthine Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe A special kind of gift.
Lagoon A small gulf or inlet.
Languor Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure Free time.
Lilt To move musically or lively.
Lissome Slender and graceful.
Lithe Slender and flexible.
Love Deep affection.
Mellifluous Sweet sounding.
Moiety One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen A slip of the ear.
Murmurous Murmuring.
Nemesis An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea A solution for all problems
Panoply A complete set.
Pastiche An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra A half-shadow.
Petrichor The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora A large quantity.
Propinquity An inclination.
Pyrrhic Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential Most essential.
Ratatouille A spicy French stew.
Ravel To knit or unknit.
Redolent Fragrant.
Riparian By the bank of a stream.
Ripple A very small wave.
Scintilla A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal Eternal.
Seraglio Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna A river in Pennsylvania.
Susurrous Whispering, hissing.
Talisman A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation Tinkling.
Umbrella Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial In trace amounts.
Wafture Waving.
Wherewithal The means.
Woebegone Sorrowful, downcast.

jiataifeng
Posts: 178
Joined: 30 Apr 2009 06:31

Re: Most Beautiful Words In English

Post by jiataifeng » 16 Sep 2018 23:53

1. At any rate, this is happiness; To be dissolved into something complete and great.
—Willa Cather,My Antonia

2. "In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars."
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

3. "She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."
—J. D. Salinger, "A Girl I Knew"

4. "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am."
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

5. Isn't it pretty to think so?
—Ernest Hemingway, The sun also rises

6. “Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
—Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

7. “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

8. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

9. He stepped down, trying not to look at her, as if she wear the sun. Yet he saw her like the sun even without looking.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

10. “‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’”
—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

11. “The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

12. “A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

13. Whatever out soul are make of, his and mine are the same.
—Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights.

14. “As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared.”
—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

15. “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”
—W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

16. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

17. “And in that moment, I saw we were infinite”
—Stephen Chbosky,The Perks of Being a Wallflower

18. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

19. “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
—Allen Ginsburg, “America”

20. “It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
—W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

21. "There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences."
—Wallace Stegner, All the Little live things

22. “At the still point, there the dance is.”
—T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”

23. “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
—Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

24. “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
—Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

25. "Let the wind rumpus start!"
—Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things.

26. “The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved

27. “How wild it was, to let it be.”
—Cheryl Strayed, Wild

28. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

29. "he was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life"
—James joyce, A Portrait of the artist as a young man.

30. “She was lost in her longing to understand.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

31. “She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
—Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”

32. “We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”
—Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead

33. Only connect.
—E.M.Forster, Howards End

34. “The half life of love is forever.”
—Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

35. “I sing myself and celebrate myself.”
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

36. “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
—Bram Stroker, Dracula

37. "You don't have to live forever, you just have to live"
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting.

38. “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
—L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

39. “I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
—Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

40. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
—Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

41. "Stay gold, ponyboy."
—S.E. Hinton, The outsiders

42. “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”
—W. B. Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”

43. “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”
—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

44. “For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.”
—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

45. "Beauty is Truth, truth beauty."
—John Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn

46. “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

47. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

48. “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

49. And the rest is rust and stardust.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

50. “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

51. “One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
—Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices

jiataifeng
Posts: 178
Joined: 30 Apr 2009 06:31

Re: Most Beautiful Words In English

Post by jiataifeng » 17 Sep 2018 00:02

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

7. When she shouted, the gulls hidden by the dune buckshot the low clouds.
– Lauren Groff

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

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

26. If you've never wept and want to have a child
– David Foster Wallace

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

37. His blood changed to falling snow
– Bernard Malamud

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

54. They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
– Cormac McCarthy

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

71. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.
– Colson Whitehead

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. I shall go there, do this discover that, love her, and then her and her and her.
– Julian Barnes

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.”
– Toni Morrison (it’s suitable to end with Toni Morrison; she could be the queen of beautiful sentences)

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