The Most Beautiful Sentences in Literature

by | Dec 17, 2014 | Thoughts and Musings

stegner quote

This is the “best sentence” that resonates most with me today.  What’s yours?  Click on this link, or the photo, for Jennifer Schaffer’s list on Buzz Feed.

Here, not the best sentences, but the first sentences of the books that happen to be on my desk as I prepare for my memoir workshop at the next residency.  See which ones you recognize:

“I always imagined I would write a book, if only a small one, that would carry one away, into a realm that could not be measured nor even remembered.”

“Whenever my mother drove us from Coastal Mississippi to New Orleans to visit my father on the weekend, she would say, “Lock the doors.”

“When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.”

“Please, she whispers, how may I help you?”

“So I guess you’ve heard about the controversy at the prison in Iraq…the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.”

“I’m sitting with my legs straight out on an examination table at the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation, where I have just arrived.”

“Creamy and flushed and covered with fuzz, our baby daughter was like a delicious peach.”

“I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of  breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.”

What a conversation we are having here.  What different worlds.  Returning so often to family, living in the aftermath unbroken.

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Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of Shadow Child, a suspenseful literary historical novel published in 2018. Her first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award, and her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award Finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City and is a Hedgebrook alumna. Reiko has been interviewed widely on motherhood including on The Today Show, 20/20, and The View. Her articles on motherhood, Hiroshima, the Japanese internment camps and radiation poisoning have been published globally, including in the L.A. Times, Guardian UK, CNN Opinion and Salon, and through the Progressive Media Project. She is a faculty member at Goddard College in the MFA in Creative Writing program, and is the advisor of the national literary journal, Clockhouse. Reiko is Japanese/Caucasian and was raised in Hawaii. She is the founder of the writing retreat Pele's Fire on the Big Island of Hawaii.
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