5 Perfect Sentences III

image

It’s our third iteration of 5 perfect sentences (the first two are here and here), because you could always use more perfect sentences.

He never fully measured up to the legend of himself, but he came closer and closer as time went on.

-“The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan” by Jorge Luis Borges

When all the involved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the distant mechanism of the stars.

-Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

And so, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed.

-“Paris” by Lorrie Moore

Most old people have something deceitful, something mendacious, in their dealings with people younger than themselves; you live at peace with them, imagine you are on the best of terms with them, know their ruling prejudices, receive continual assurances of amity, take the whole thing for granted; and when something decisive happens and those peaceful relations, so long nourished, should come into effective operation, suddenly these old people rise before you like strangers, show that they have deeper and stronger convictions, and now for the first time literally unfurl their banner, and with terror you read upon it the new decree.

-“The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole]” by Franz Kafka

And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city–a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.

-“Beverly Home” by Denis Johnson

Posted by Gabe Habash. Follow him on Twitter.