I’ve talked about what makes a line of prose really jump out at me here. But in my ongoing search for prose perfection I figured I’d start sharing some of the passages that have smacked me between the eyes like a transcendent two-by-four of late. Here’s a sampling from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. All emphasis is mine:
"They stand in rigid, terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse’s back. He flows upward in a swooping swirl, like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air, shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands sprattled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leach-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again."
"Back-running, tunneled between the two sets of bobbing mule ears, the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon, and the front axle were a spool."
"The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads. The light has turned copper, in the eye portentous, in the nose sulfurous, smelling of lightning."
"When I reach the front he is struggling with Gillespie, the one lean in underclothes, the other stark naked. They are like two figures in a Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality by the red glare."
How about you? What’s the best line you’ve come across in recent reading?
