#SundaySentence
Every weekend I participate in David Abrams’s “#SundaySentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
I would ask my mom and dad and my brother, Carter.
Source: Anderson Cooper, quoted in The New York Times‘s “By the Book” column.

I don’t get it. Why is this a memorable sentence?
If you’re aware of the context (which I’m not supposed to explain when I present the line) you realize that it is, in part, a nod to the fact that after losing first his father (when he was 10) and then his brother (when he was a very young adult) and, most recently, his mother—it’s a highly moving sentence, particularly when it’s followed, as it is in the original source, with this: “I know it’s not a very clever answer, but it’s the truth.” It brought me to tears.