Here are three worthy candidates. The third isn’t a sentence so much as a passage, but it demands inclusion:
–Damon Runyon
–Dorothy Parker, upon her return from Switzerland
–Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
Here are three worthy candidates. The third isn’t a sentence so much as a passage, but it demands inclusion:
–Damon Runyon
–Dorothy Parker, upon her return from Switzerland
–Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
Since nonfiction has been posted, I’m going to admit to having read Blind Faith, by Joe McGinnis. Now, McGinnis’s Fatal Vision has been called into question in recent years, so it’s possible that he took liberties with the dialogue between the detectives on the Marshall case, and they didn’t really say,
“Golf clubs. He passed away due to golf clubs.”
and
“We were respectful. We fingerprinted her with the utmost of respect.”
and also
“…and boy, does she remember every single drop of salad dressing.”
I am the world’s laziest…
The library was having a sale,I got some stuff, and I clipped part of a page from a National Geographic, just because. It’s c.1995, and is from an article about the Jamestown settlement (NF seems to be allowed, and the turn of phrase is priceless):
The colonists who had suffered in this alleged Virginia paradise did not know that the Orient was actually about 11,000 miles away, but they would have wondered why no copperheads, voracious insects, or hostile natives were depicted along with the birds and bunny rabbits.
Twain has to be in public domain by now.
To the Gas Company
Hartford, February 12, 1891.
Dear Sirs:
Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again today. Haven’t you a telephone?
Ys
S L Clemens (Mark Twain)
This site has tons of wonderful Mark Twain letters and excerpts (including th gas company one)
This is more than one sentence, but the first sentence is quite long, two-thirds of the quote. From Life On The Mississippi:
Thank you for that rackensack, saved me some research. A dark-horse candidate from Catch-22
Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they would begin to have shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenties they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds.
I can’t find it in the text, but there is also the line refering to a woman’s ‘divine fulcrum.’
My contribution is for the Wodehouse fans out there. If you haven’t already, check out the works of Saki, AKA H.H. Munro. Here’s a link to my favorite, Esme.
http://haytom.us/showarticle.php?id=17
In the distance, a toad farted ominously.
—Spider Robinson
Not according to the copyright notice in the edition of the Viking Portable Mark Twain I used as a reference. Albert Bigelow Paine’s edition of the Twain’s letters doesn’t include this gas company letter (though it does include a different one, similar in tone but with a different complaint) – this is available as an free etext from Project Gutenberg and is apparently in the public domain. This letter, however, seems to have been published for the first time by Bernard De Voto in the first edition of the Portable in 1946. Copyright was renewed in 1984 by one of Clemens’ heirs. Obviously, copyright on the individual works may be different, particularly for works published by Twain in the 1800s which are generally public domain by now. This letter appears not to be public domain, however, and I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to establish otherwise, so I decided to err on the side of caution. Others have since posted the whole thing, and in looking all this up there appear to be any number of places where it’s available in its entirety on the web.
BTW, I also leared that the recent (2005) edition of the Viking Portable Mark Twain omits many of the letters that De Voto included, this one included.
By the by, thanks to everyone here! Some nice reading tips you guys have given me. Runyon, hmmm…
From Venus on the Half Shell by “Kilgore Trout”, who I have been informed was one of Vonnegut’s friends, not Vonnegut himself.
While I would hardly call them literature, Victo Mollo, one of the all-time great English bridge players has written a series of books describing the exploits of the members of a bridge club known as the Griffins, the star of the club being “Hideous Hog” (thought to be Mollo himself) called thus because of his insistence on playing every hand himsel (“I assure you partner it is for your own good.”)
From the opening of “Bridge in the Menagerie,” the first in the series: “We play quickly, for we feel that it is more dignified to make mistakes through lack of forethought than after mature deliberation.” The series is obviously more enjoyable if you are a bridge player, but even if you aren’t the Hog is a character that will definitely make you laugh.
As long as we’re on that tangent, allow me to paraphrase a review of a WW1 wargame:
“It’s often been the opinion amongst wargame enthusiasts that a World War 1 wargame would be boring due to lack of options and static tactics. The Great War does nothing to dispel this opinion.”
(Name changed due to lack of remembrance)