One Great Moment

“I know all about reporters, Walter. A lot of daffy buttinskis running around without a nickel in their pockets and for what? So a million hired girls and motormen’s wives’ll know what’s going on.”

Why is it great? Yes, it’s three sentences. But it’s one brilliant summation of journalists, from the best-written movie about journalists of all time. God, the banter in the screenplay!…
September 20, 2017
Kari Howard

“If the history of the earth’s tides should one day be written by some observer of the universe, it would no doubt be said that they reached their greatest grandeur and power in the younger days of Earth, and that they slowly grew feebler and less imposing until one day they ceased to be.”

Why is it great? Few authors have written as magnificently about nature as Rachel Carson, and this sentence is a good example.  Its strength is not in form but content. …
September 13, 2017
Roy Peter Clark

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”

Why is it great? For “Controversy Week” on Storyboard, I chose a sentence from one of the most controversial books of the 20th century. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was shocking on…
September 6, 2017
Kari Howard

“Sometimes at noon down South on the hottest of days, when everyone is shivering inside their arctic offices, I go outside just to hear the metallic whirring of the cicadas start up in the trees on the edge of the parking lot. Their tymbals pulsate against their abdomens and the thick air reverberates with the loneliest sound in the universe.”

In addition to the music of Blythe’s lush language, I love how he captures this brash paradox–that a chorus can make us feel so lonely. Furthermore I love how, like…
August 30, 2017
Julia Shipley

“Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.”

Why is it great? Yesterday was Dorothy Parker’s birthday. (She would have been 124, reminding me of her classic line, “Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy…
August 23, 2017
Kari Howard

“Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”

Why is it great? Here in E.B. White’s Maine, August is bittersweet, bringing whispers of summer’s end even at the height of its ripeness. Apples, the fruit of fall, begin…
August 16, 2017
Kari Howard

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."
August 9, 2017
Kari Howard

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.”

Why is it great? Nabokov is masterful here, not just stylistically but emotionally. He interrupts Humbert Humbert’s grotesque pursuit of Lolita by having him address the reader directly with an…
August 2, 2017
Kari Howard

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”

Why is it great? I love how Lee has written this line: It tumbles out of Scout’s head exactly like the thoughts of a 6-year-old child, all “this and this and…
July 26, 2017
Kari Howard

“And one day he made an error, and then struck out, and it sounded like all of Fenway was booing, and he ran to the bench with his head down, the red rising in his face, the shame in his belly, and the rage. Ted thought: These are the ones who cheered, the fans I waved my cap to? Well, never again.”

Why is it great? Yes, it’s more than one sentence. But in this one short stanza, Cramer has captured all the rage and sorrow and loneliness and drive of the…
July 19, 2017
Kari Howard