swooning-over-sentences

At least half of his hunters writhed on the ground with grubs already inside them, causing horrendous agony. These had to be helped away by terrified Ship People whose courage lay trembling in their hearts as lightly as leaves.

Spence,_ he says as he lifts his brown eyes to meet mine. __ou still make it hard to breathe._ __nd you,_ I say, swallowing as I try to rein in my overeager heart, __re still the same old charmer you always were.

He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.

From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.

He attempted to bark the order and succeeded, albeit with more of a chihuahua result than intended.

I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam."Or:"The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.""The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers."My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.

Some stories aren't meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles.