Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash
I am back with my annual roundup of sentences I read this year that stopped me in my tracks. Sentences I underlined, bookmarked, and thought about for days and weeks after.
In no particular order, here are the 22 most beautiful lines (occasionally I cheat and include 2–3) I read in 2022:
She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.
Great Circle | Maggie Shipstead
People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.
My Dark Vanessa | Kate Elizabeth Russell
When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.
The Sentence | Louise Erdrich
Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.
These Precious Days | Ann Patchett
Where does music go when it’s not playing? — she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.
Near to the Wild Heart | Clarice Lispector
The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn’t care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can’t be defined.
Whereabouts | Jhumpa Lahiri
It’s remarkable what people become blind to when they’re in such darkness.
Eileen | Ottessa Moshfegh
He spoke in short sentences, every word fell on the bed clear and straight as a knife.
A Sister’s Story | Donatella Di Pietrantonio
… it seemed to me that my face was hanging to one side like the coiled skin of an orange after the knife has begun to peel it.
The Days of Abandonment | Elena Ferrante
I wonder if any family, after too long trying and failing to love one another, can hear one another’s words beyond all the ways that they fall short.
Want: A Novel | Lynn Steger Strong
I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Robin Wall Kimmerer
What does the world require of you?
Nothing.
So find in yourself what you require
and go.
And Yet | Kate Baer
She seemed a lacquered and corrected sort of person, a flattering portrait of a woman painted atop that very woman.
Great Circle | Maggie Shipstead
An airplane crossed the sky, and she imagined its interior-people packed in rows like eggs in a carton, the chemical smell of the toilets, pretzels in foil pouches, cans hiss-popping open, black oval of night sky embedded in the rattling walls. How strange that something so drab, so confined, so stifling with sour exhalations and the fumes of indifferent machinery might be mistaken for a star.
Seating Arrangements | Maggie Shipstead
It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.
Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan
Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.
Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy
But a favor has to be answered by another favor, and the courtesies became a chain that imprisoned us.
The Days of Abandonment | Elena Ferrante
All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.
Matrix | Lauren Groff
I will proclaim all of my mistakes and contradictions, for all the women who cannot do so, for all the women we’ve called muses without learning their names, whose silence we mistook for consent. I stood on their shoulders to get here.
My Body | Emily Ratajkowski
This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.
Oh, William! | Elizabeth Strout
I assure you, my dear, were you to play the piano on the moon, I would hear every chord.
A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles
It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?
Either/Or | Elif Batuman
50 books, hundreds of lines underlined, and even some tears shed, this was a spectacular year of reading for me.
I hope some of these sentences resonated with you! What were the most beautiful words you read this year?