In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence”project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“A person who doesn’t live in nature, the way a stone or an animal does, won’t come up with two decent lines in his entire life … “
Source: Isaac Babel, “Awakening” (trans. Maxim D. Shrayer; Tablet magazine)
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
On that night, though, as the sky truly was midnight blue, darker than the Crayola crayon I loved best, and the stars were so white they spotted the night like bursts of snow, I walked upon that ice and felt upheld and safe.
Source: Sophfronia Scott’s “To Winter Warming” (in Scott’s essay collection Love’s Long Line)
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
I knew that after the war my grandmother had started lecturing at Moscow State, and had consulted on a film about Ivan the Great (“gatherer of the lands of Rus”) which so reminded Joseph Stalin of himself that he gave her an apartment in central Moscow; that despite this she was forced out of Moscow State a few years later, at the height of the “anti-cosmopolitan”—i.e., anti-Jewish—campaign; and that she got by after that as a tutor and as a translator from other Slavic languages.
Source: Keith Gessen, “How Did We Come to Know You?” (The New Yorker)
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
And a little davening now and then wouldn’t do any harm.
Source: Simon Schama, “How to Be a Jew in the Age of Trump?” (The New York Times Book Review)
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
It’s hardly news anymore: 150 killed on a Wednesday, 84 killed on a Thursday, 10 killed on a Friday, oh well.
Source: Fatima Faizi, “When the Bombs Explode, There Is Work to Be Done” (The New York Times)