Inspired Sentence 12

The glasses are “brimmed,” about to overflow, just as the line itself flows over, the verse turns, into the next, with the violent enjambment on “muscatel/bubble.”

That’s from Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem (2006), a book I cherish. It’s a collection of fifteen lectures that Muldoon delivered during his tenure as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. Each piece explores a poem. The above quote comes from the first lecture, which focuses on W. B. Yeats’ “All Souls’ Night.” Muldoon is analyzing the line “And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel.” He shows how the line itself ingeniously enacts the brimfulness of the glasses by overflowing into the next line: “And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel / Bubble upon the table.” The technique is called “enjambment”: the continuation of a sentence without pause beyond the end of a line. I’m guessing that Muldoon calls this particular enjambment “violent” because it brings the sounds of two vivid words – “muscatel” and “bubble” – smack up against each other to create a sudden, surprising chime. 

I love sentences that contain bits of embedded quotation. They’re like Rauschenberg assemblages. This one by Muldoon is a beauty. 

Inspired Sentence 11

But what are those quadrangles with a colorful chess-board pattern under the hooves of the black cow?

I love that question. It’s so specific, it verges on the surreal. It’s from Zbigniew Herbert’s “Lascaux,” the first essay in his exquisite 1962 collection Barbarian in the Garden. Herbert is in the Lascaux cave, looking at the paintings of animals on the walls and vault. He’s unable to answer his question. He knows there are theories, but none are certain. He says, “Amidst the raucous breathing of the Lascaux animals, the geometric signs are silent and perhaps will remain silent forever.” Nevertheless, his question is a beauty – a form of serious noticing. 

Inspired Sentence 10

The childhood of the boys he drew, like the snowman, had now dissolved into adulthood: most of all, Bewick was suggesting that art, even a simple woodcut, was the only true magic that could hold lives from melting into time.

This sentence, from Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (2006), beautifully expresses my own view of art’s purpose – “the only true magic that can hold lives from melting into time.” It’s a wonderful variation on James Wood’s idea that art is rescue: “Literature, like art, pushes against time’s fancy ... offers to rescue the life of things from the dead” (Serious Noticing, 2019). Both lines are inspired – two of my touchstones. 

Inspired Sentence 9

Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars.

I believe this is true. It’s from John Updike’s “Logic Is Beautiful” (included in his 2005 essay collection Still Looking), a review of an exhibition of sculptures by Elie Nadelman. The essay’s title is Nadelman’s credo, not Updike’s. Nadelman believed that “All that is logical is beautiful, all that is illogical is inevitably ugly.” Updike disagreed. He says, “There is a hermetic quality to Nadelman’s statues, as if they have been sealed against infestations of illogical detail. In his later work, the layers of sealant get thicker and thicker, and toward the end his figures, fingerless and all but faceless, seem wrapped in veils as thick as blankets.” 

Updike argued for specificity. His own exquisite writing exemplified it. 

Inspired Sentence 8

There is an odd rakishness, a mettlesome spirit, running through the cubism of the rocks of this natural esplanade, which must be the combined effect of its undulant surface, the general twist the nearby fault has given to the vicinity, and the carefree poise of a square-faced block – I am sure it must measure forty feet each way – that has detached itself from the cliff against which it leans one elbow, and stands on two fat little legs looking as if it were about to skip into the sea with the ponderous charm of one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls.

That’s from Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1985) – one of the great landscape books. Robinson is describing a section of the north-western coast of Aran. I love that “the cubism of the rocks” and the way the metaphor is picked up again at the end in the description of the square-faced block that “leans one elbow” against the cliff. When was the last time you saw a giant chunk of coastal stone compared to “one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls”? Probably never. It’s a surprising, imaginative, original image – one of dozens in this extraordinary book.  

Inspired Sentence 7

A few special conifers such as bristlecone pine can live through sequential, sectorial deaths – compartmentalizing their external afflictions, shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark.

That’s from Jared Farmer’s brilliant Elderflora (2022), a history of ancient trees. I relish the clear scientific precision of it (“sequential,” “sectorial,” “compartmentalizing”). Farmer is explaining how the bristlecone pine works, how it manages to live almost indefinitely. I love that “compartmentalizing their external afflictions.” The final part – “shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark” – is inspired. Note that “for an extra millennium” – not a year, not a decade, not a century. A millennium! All from a “solitary strip of bark”!

Inspired Sentence 6

I had slept beautifully, rolled up in the rugs on the floor of my bare room, stars shining in on me through the black window, and I looked forward eagerly to whatever might happen next.

That’s from Philip Glazebrook’s great Journey to Kars (1984) – one of my all-time favorite books. I’m currently rereading it. It’s an account of Glazebrook’s 1980 trip through the old Serbian and Greek provinces and islands, through the ruined cities of Asia Minor as far as Turkey’s eastern frontier with Russia at the fortress of Kars, then back by Trebizond, Istanbul and the Balkan capitals. In the sentence quoted above, he’s looking back on his stay in an ancient Anatolian village. The room he rented there, actually just a hut, “had a collection of worn-out rugs and old clothes heaped against its bare walls, an earthen floor, and a door with so large a gap under it that cats and even chickens merely ducked their heads to follow us in.” 

I love the positivity of this sentence. Glazebrook doesn’t complain about his rough accommodations. Quite the opposite. He says he “slept beautifully, rolled up in the rugs on the floor of my bare room, stars shining in on me through the black window.” That “rolled up in the rugs” makes me smile. That, for me, is the inspired bit. I also love the “and I looked forward eagerly to whatever might happen next.” That’s the spirit of a true traveller. 

Inspired Sentence 5

Years ago I found myself in Indonesia, in Djakarta, which was once called Batavia, sitting at a table in a restaurant in the heart of the Chinese quarter of Glodok – near Kota, to anyone who knows this city, immense in extent, where the long streets change their names every two or three blocks, causing the visitor to go mad.

That’s one of my all-time favorite sentences. It’s the opening line of Aldo Buzzi’s brilliant essay “Travels to Djakarta, Gorgonzola, Crescenzago, London, Milan,” included in his slim, exquisite 1996 collection Journey to the Land of the Flies. I love it for its exoticism – “Indonesia,” “Djakarta,” “Batavia,” “the Chinese quarter of Glodok,” “Kota.” I love the “I found myself” – indicating an element of chance or drift. And I love the hinged, irregular construction joined together by a relative pronoun (“which”) and a relative adverb (“where”). What an original assemblage! 

Inspired Sentence #4

The land sharpens to a last dark-forested point, and beyond it the horizon widens into ocean and the co-motion of sky and water is lost in a white, grainy light, and there the river’s last trace is slow-vanishing spirals in the water, shallowing as they slip on; now just faint dints in the water’s pewter, now shined flat. 

This is from Part III of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (2025), which I’m currently reading. Part III is called “The Living River.” It’s my favorite section of the book. It’s about a kayak trip that Macfarlane and four others take down the Mutehekau Shipu River in the Nitassinan territory of eastern Quebec. The above quotation is a description of the Mutehekau Shipu’s mouth, where it empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Macfarlane is a superb describer. That “now just faint dints in the water’s pewter, now shined flat” is very fine. 

Inspired Sentence #3

On Mondays, Eugène or Julia would yank a rabbit out of its hutch, kill it with one brisk corkscrew twist of the neck, flay it to its blueish plum-colored stretch of newborn baby skin, and hang it next door to a twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper until Sunday, when it would be jugged and slowly cooked with prunes, its liver either eaten as a starter or added to the stew to deepen it up. 

This is from Patrick McGuinness's Other People's Countries (2014), which I'm currently reading. What a wonderful book! It’s an evocation of the ancient Belgian town of Bouillon, where McGuinness has a house, inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Eugène is his grandfather. Julia is his great-grandmother. I relish the specificity of the description (“blueish plum-colored stretch of newborn baby skin,” “twist of bluebottle-encrusted flypaper”) and the vivid, active verbs (“yank,” “flay,” “hang”). “Jugged” is inspired! The whole sentence is inspired – a surprising, delightful, original combination of words and images. 

Inspired Sentence #2

My own re-photography project was a matter of simply being open to what a place could communicate to a person – standing in what was often a place that felt very far away, looking around to experience the panorama through my own experience, as if I were in that box of wood on a tripod, as if I were, to use the nineteenth-century photography term, a sensitive plate.

I love this sentence. It’s from Robert Sullivan’s wonderful Double Exposure (2024), in which he explores the work of the great nineteenth-century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan. Sullivan so closely identifies with his subject that his writing enacts O’Sullivan’s art. Here’s another sample, this from the book’s brilliant Chapter 8 (“Salt Lake Desert, 1869”):

As the light shifted, I felt as if I was on the wet plate of a photographer, my own self, and by experiencing the light and the mist and the lake itself, I was being exposed, as if what was precious and destructive in me, my silver and guncotton, was being touched and changed, as if the world was moving into me while something inside me escaped. 

Sullivan imagines himself as O’Sullivan’s wet-plate camera. It’s an inspired perspective, providing remarkable insight into both O’Sullivan’s art and Sullivan’s deeply personal experience of it.  

Inspired Sentence #1

Almost every day, it seemed, my drawing improved a tiny bit, guided by the shadowy anchovies of subtlety and shadow that swam their way up through the paper immediately under my pencil.

Wow! What a delightful sentence! It’s by Nicholson Baker. I encountered it last night, reading his wonderful Finding a Likeness (2024). It made me smile. Why? It’s original. It’s creative. Most of all, it’s surprising – the surprising word choices (“anchovies,” “subtlety,” “shadow,” “swam," "paper") and the delightful, surprising way they’re combined (“the shadowy anchovies of subtlety and shadow that swam their way up through the paper immediately under my pencil”). It’s like listening to jazz and suddenly hearing a gorgeous, shimmering combination of notes never heard before. Baker’s sentence is like that – beautiful, lyrical, beating with the creative impulse.