Sometime (relatively) soon I will reveal my favorite books from the past year in reading; there’s a whole month of pages to go, after all.
But as my favorite unit of reading is not books, but sentences, I thought it worthwhile to share the best sentences—or, in most cases, the best passages comprised of wonderful, moment-altering sentences—my eyes ran across in 2022. Many of these passages are housed in books from the past year; others know older origins.
Here are 13 of many sentence-level wonders to sit with and take in:
James Baldwin, Another Country
“All I know, God made every bit of ground I ever walked on and everything God made is holy. And don’t none of us know what goes on in the heart of someone, don’t many of us know what’s going on in our own hearts for the matter of that, and so can’t none of us say why he did what he did. Ain’t none of us been there and so don’t none of us know. We got to pray that the Lord will receive him like we pray that the Lord’s going to receive us. That’s all. That’s all.”
Caylin Capra-Thomas, Iguana Iguana
“The obscure chorus of your own life keeps cawing into the diamond dark, under the roaring of each body you inhabit.”
Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage
“It seems to me, life is mostly spent putting ourselves back together. But hopefully in new and interesting ways. For me that is what the creative process is, for sure—it is the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense.”
Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything
“Sadness takes time. Sadness is made up of minutes. Hope is made up of years.”
Sloane Crosley, Cult Classic
“I farmed out bite-size nostalgia in the mode of lists of popular books and movies and podcasts, or assigned essays on popular books or movies or podcasts or think pieces responding to widely circulated essays on popular books or movies or podcasts. The Lloyd Dobler nightmare for the new millennium.”
Don DeLillo, Underworld
“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”
Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
“I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about people. But of course it is not. … Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy
“Which means coming to terms with the fact that this confluence, this confoundment, this stew, this commonly broken and ever-molting creature that is for the time being a Ross Gay, causes harm, has caused harm, and will cause harm. Understood? Understood. And a reasonable aspiration for one’s life is to cause less harm, though, to be sure, you’ll never get to harm zero. But pretending we haven’t caused harm, and evading the grief that might attend such an acknowledgement, at which I personally am quite skilled, just causes more hurt. Which I don’t grieve. Which causes more hurt. Which I don’t grieve. Then more hurt. And more grief evaded. Then more hurt. More grief evaded. More hurt. More grief evaded. By which, it happens fast I hear, that was my life. I don’t want that to be my life.”
Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night
“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
“The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude ask that their history be considered.”
Frank O’Hara, “Anxiety” from Selected Poems
“If I could get really dark, richly dark, like being drunk, that’s the best that’s open as a field. Not the best, but the best except for the impossible pure light, to be as if above a vast prairie, rushing and pausing over the tiny golden heads in deep grass.”
KJ Ramsey, The Lord is My Courage
“People say we’re tearing down the church. I think we’re tearing down the stages.”
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh
“… It seems cruel to believe that God would require grief to make a truth known. I refuse to believe we need to dissect our pain in search of purpose. Sometimes shit is just shit. It’s okay to say so.”
Sally Thomas, Works of Mercy
“At the edge of this ocean, to the west, the mountains hung like low blue clouds. Above them, real clouds, cumulus thunderheads, were piling like darker, more substantial mountains.”