one of the best sentences in the english language

"And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms.

They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the

feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered

only what they gained and lost by it. And some of the farms grew

so large that one man could not even conceive of them any more,

so large that it took batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of

interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the soil, to replenish;

straw bosses to see that the stooping men were moving along

the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand.

Then such a farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a

store. He paid the men, and sold them food, and took the money

back. And after a while he did not pay the men at all, and

saved bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might

work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might

find that he owed money to the company. And the owners not only

did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen

the farms they owned."

when I read the topic, I thought it would be a joke about the line "I'm not pregnant"

on topic, I don't find that sentence any beautiful than any other sentence I may have read in english, but I'm not a native english speaker so I may not be able to tell the difference. But I guess you're more intrigued by the meaning of it, than by the pure sound, or flow, of the words.

To make a counter example, I like best, both in sound, rhythm and meaning, the last line of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller: "That sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me - its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed."

I know, I know, it's not a single sentence tho.

''snape killed dumbledore''

omg

Just pick one

http://www.goodreads....Thomas_Pynchon

  Quote

“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.”

lol

  Quote

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

  Quote

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the colour of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which - though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off - the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects...

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

I love that short quotation so much.

  Quote

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

best sentence(s):

My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. I have taught you almost to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or murmuring to your soul the passion and sorrow and mystery of life and at the same time have taught you to make filthy signs to me with your lips and tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches and noises, and even to do in my presence the most shameful and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you pulled up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you while you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.

"The daughters are tired of kissing each other, although some are not."

  On 11/16/2012 at 1:30 AM, disparaissant said:

  Quote

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

i'm guessing that's judy isn't it?

That's a textual J. Butlerian Jihad if I've ever seen one.

  On 11/16/2012 at 1:34 AM, dese manz hatin said:

best sentence(s):

 

My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. I have taught you almost to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or murmuring to your soul the passion and sorrow and mystery of life and at the same time have taught you to make filthy signs to me with your lips and tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches and noises, and even to do in my presence the most shameful and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you pulled up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you while you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.

lol, is that one of Joyce's dirty letters?

seller door lol

  Quote

Bouffant says that intervening in order to prevent a murder is to curtail the freedom of the murderer and yet that freedom, by definition, is natural and universal, without condition. You may recall his famous dictum: 'If any man is not free, then I, too, am a small pie made of chicken', which has led to a considerable amount of debate.

"let's just have a quickie"

both the joke answers and the serious ones melted beautifully to create this great thread, and here's my contribution

  Quote

“I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.”

- honore de balzac in a love letter

Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams):

  Quote

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.