I'm challenging you, /lit/

This part cannot be slighted or the blackness will take over, and then the reel begins playing in the mind, that hideous tape that nothing seems to erase or edit or alter, the tape that zooms in and out of scenes so swiftly the body feels vertigo, and the eye focuses in disbelief on a pin, a small metal grenade pin, and the entire universe--yes, all of it--wrenches to a halt to consider one simple question: Is that pin straight, or is that pin bent? --Charles Bowden, "Being Max Cleland," 1999

He turns the empty glass in his hand, and considers biting off the rim. --Raymond Carver, "What Is It?" 1972

I shall sit at the calcified knobs that once were his knees and summon the courage to ask of Zim the question burning in my soul: Why does Joe Torre wear a wristwatch in the dugout? --Scott Raab, "Zimmer," 2001

>single sentences is all the Americans can take
Why am I not surprised?

If you have not cheated yet, it's because you are still too grateful to be secure, or you have not yet had the opportunity, or the right color of red hair has not come along and sat down at the bar on a Tuesday when the jukebox was playing Leonard Cohen and your manhattan tasted like the future.

—Lisa Taddeo, "Why We Cheat," April 2012

>>9179818
What crap.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

>>9179818
>I'm a selfish and short-sighted whore so everyone else must be one too
lmao

>>9179713


Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end.
- Pynchon

/thread

>>9179713
None of this is very good. Maybe the Carver one, if you're into that sort of thing.

>>9179713
Fuck you, I'm posting a paragraph.

Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, out-worn all the strong and specious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests; What Prince can promise such diuturnity unto his Reliques, or might not gladly say,

Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim.

Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments. In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation and obscurity their protection: If they dyed by violent hands, and were thrust into their Urnes, these bones become considerable, and some old Philosophers would honour them, whose souls they conceived most pure, which were thus snatched from their bodies; and to retain a stranger propension unto them: whereas they weariedly left a languishing corps, and with faint desires of re-union. If they fell by long and aged decay, yet wrapt up in the bundle of time, they fall into indistinction, and make but one blot with Infants. If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death; our life is a sad composition; We live with death, and die not in a moment. How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah, were work for Archimedes: Common Counters summe up the life of Moses his man. Our dayes become considerable like petty sums by minute accumulations; where numerous fractions make up but small round numbers; and our dayes of a span long make not one little finger.

>>9179742
>He turns the empty glass in his hand, and considers biting off the rim
lolled

don't know wtf is going on with all the other shitty sentences in this thread but this one is perfect and hilarious