10 Great Sentences from the Books of Fall 2011

"He remember exactly where he'd been standing, and how Madeleine had stooped forward, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, as the sheet slipped and, for a few exhilarating moments, her pale, quiet, Episcopalian breast exposed itself to this sight."

October 11, amazon.com

"Crying over spilt milk is not as pointless as people say, it is in a way instructive because it shows the true scale of the frivolity of certain human behaviour, because if milk is spilled, it's spilled and all you can do is clean it up, and if abel died a cruel death that's because someone took his life."

October 4, amazon.com

"In retrospect, perhaps the intensity of that moment, the pressure he felt, was the immensity of the farewell, for this was the goodbye traffic, the last latenesses and their attendant excuses, the final inconveniences of an expiring world."

October 18, amazon.com

Read an excerpt of Zone One here >>

"I didn't tell her I was at a pagan celebration where people danced around bonfires, a kind of dress rehearsal for the end of the world."

September 27, amazon.com

"Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain."

October 15,

"I'm sure you have no idea who H.G. Wells even is."

October 4, amazon.com

"Whatever the fate might have been for our ship, which was now traveling like a coffin in the cyclone, Sir Hector enjoyed a few good days letting free the truth about his wealth, his hidden pleasures, his genuine affection for his wife, while the vessel plunged into the bowels of the sea and then emerged like an encrusted coelacanth, the ocean pouring off its features, so that machinists, thrown against the red-hot engines, burned their arms, and the supposed cream of the cream of the East stumbled against pickpocket in the long corridors, and band members fell off the dais in the midst of 'Blame It on My Youth,' as Cassius and I lay spread-eagled on the Promenade Deck, under the rain."

October 4, amazon.com

"I shipped my paddle and just sat there three hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and listening to the loons converse."

November 8, amazon.com

"Now we approach the part of the story a reader couldn't be blamed for having skipped forward to — 'flipped forward to' if he or she has a hard copy, but otherwise 'scrolled to' or 'used the "Find" feature to locate' — the part where a mother has sex with her son."

October 18, amazon.com

"With the windows down, the forest smells akin to what you might get if you boiled Pine-Sol on the stovetop while roasting a sack of rain-soaked soil in the oven."

October 25, amazon.com