I suspect we all learn more about style by looking at other people's
sentences. Here are a few worth looking at.
Thus, she taught me very little--at least in the usual sense of the term:
she a teacher about life, I a learner. [John Berger, "Her Secrets,"]
Money has no ears, no eyes, no respect; it is all gut, mouth, and ass.
[Guy Davenport, "Making it Uglier to the Airport,"]
The men were wearing Western shirts with string ties, the women slacks
and flowered cotton blouses. [Frances FitzGerald, "Sun City--1983"]
And that's the way, I'm afraid, we appeared to others--as creeps with
squints, bad posture, unclean complexions, unscrubbed teeth, tousled hair.
[William Gass, "Of Speed Readers and Lip-Movers"]
There is no gist, no simple translation, no key concept that will
unlock
these works; actually, there is no lock, no door, no wall, no room, no house,
no world. [William Gass, "Of Speed Readers and Lip-Movers"]
Alone with her cat, tending her potted plants, her tomato patch
in the
backyard, playing her recorder, dusting her unread and unreadable books,
brushing her marvelous hair, meditating, exercising, lifting her lovely and
longing face toward the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her
time, through space, through all the concatenate cells of her unfolding self.
[Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang]
She searched. She hunted. She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting
for a
vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a
platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.
[Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang]
There is no water; there is no soil; there is no grass; there are
no trees
except a few brave cottonwoods deep in the canyons. Nothing but skeleton
rock, the skin of sand and dust, the silence, the space, the mountains
beyond. [Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
Now they were alone, he at his table, she at hers. [John O'Hara,
"The
Madeline Wherry Case"]
His wife persisted, as her fingers did with the daily
tasks--hesitating,
picking over dried beans, working the paste of ash over the pot--putting
together the past from the broken pieces brought before her by the yellow
bakkie. [Nadine Gordimer, July's People]
She told me how much fun she had on all the rides and would I
buy
her some cotton candy and wasn't the weather fantastic and could she have
some popcorn, too, and how was my knee and why wasn't everyone else in
the world at Riverview and did I have enough money for a large box of
popcorn and did I really have a good time? I said yes, yes, yes, fine, I don't
know, yes, yes, and I only got mildly depressed when I remembered that
Sarah wouldn't be next to me forever. [John R. Powers, The
Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God]
Sound in wind and limb except for arthritis, conjunctivitis,
rheumatitis,
sinovitis, bug bitis, colitis, bronchitis, dermatitis, phebitis, and intermittent
retention of pee. [Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth]
He may be viewed tonight as a plump, smooth, pink, baldish,
podgy
goodman, robbed of the importance of spectacles, squatting in breast-high
water, scraping his lather-smeared cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny
lawn-mower, and with melancholy dignity clawing through the water to
recover a slippery and active piece of soap. [Sinclair Lewis,
Babbitt]
Bob Woodward, Sam Donaldson, Ben Bradlee, Art Buchwald,
Dan
Quayle, Marilyn Quayle, James Baker, Robert Bork, Kitty Dukakis, George
Will, David Stockman: these have been clients of Robert Barnett's. ["The
Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, August 9, 1993).]
The Imperial Ballroom was packed, and a standing-room-only
crowd of
music-industry entrepreneurs and aspirants lined the back and sides of the
auditorium. The profusion of sartorial hip-hop styles was well represented
by athletic shoes (Adidas, Champion, Nike, Reebok, Puma), headgear
(kerchiefs and baseball caps worn backward, sidewise, and regulation), and
T-shirts with slogans ("Legalis It," "Wrekshop," "Bungee Frogs," "Kill 'em
All," "Triggers Got No Heart," "Recycling the Unsalvagable," "I'm Living
Fat"). ["The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, August 9,
1993), p. 27.]
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up
out of
the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns,
and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was
like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth
as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat,
and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to
death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after
the beast. [Rev. 13:1]
Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new
wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip
of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I
was flesh-flake, feather, bone. [Annie Dillard]
He ate more and drank more and was more dramatically
profane and
threw more money away and had more fun and fell sicker and tipped higher
and drove a car faster and laughed more and blubbered more fat man's
beery tears and was kinder and knew more priests and visited more
orphanages and hospitals and grabbed more tabs and staked busted guys
more and made more people happier and bet horses more and had a
heavier stomach and pitched more scoreless innings in a World Series and
struck more home runs and had been paid more wages before inflation and
ferocious taxes and was fined more and awed more big league ballplayers as
well as boys and straightened out baseball when the Black Sox scandal had
ruined it. Babe Ruth is the greatest, and baseball finally admitted it.
[Jimmy Cannon]
Smith wasn't charismatic, daring, or new, and all those negatives
recommended him: he made Labour seem safe. [Sidney Blumenthal, "The
Next Prime Minister," The New Yorker, February 5, 1996, p.
39.]
I have a bed on a wooden platform--three steps up--and I lie
nested at
the window, from which I can see midtown and its changing parade of
towers and light; birds flying past cast shadows on me, my face, my chest.
[Harold Brodkey, "This Wild Darkness," The New Yorker,
February 5, 1996]
As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of
his
throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it
was hot; a brandy mash `to keep the cold out of his stomach'; and then
sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner--
soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni,
various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later
claret and in the evening, shandigaff. [Elliott Roosevelt writing to his
mother about Theodore, his brother, in Joseph P. Lash's Eleanor and
Franklin (NY: Norton, 1971), p. 11.]
I didn't believe I had watched 100 missions. Ploesti, Schweinfurt,
Regensburg, Marienburg, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremburg,
Ludwigshafen, Mannheim, Wesel, Grossostheim, Merseburg, Duisberg,
Augsburg, Hanover, Gustavsburg, Cologne, all targets, all recorded like all
the other minutiae of the twentieth century . . . [Julius Horwitz, Can I
Get There By Candlelight]