Have you ever stopped midway through a page just to marvel at the beauty of a single, perfect sentence?
And I don’t mean grammatically or structurally perfect—in fact, it might have broken every rule of punctuation you were taught in school.
What I mean is that the sentence just struck you, like a bolt of lightning, literally leaving you breathless at the power of its prose.
While we often quote famous lines from films and books, it seems we spend less time really appreciating the simple beauty of a few words strung together to convey meaning. But in this post, we’ve collected 50 breathtaking sentences that are beautiful all on their own for you ponder, save, or share with your friends.
What Makes a Sentence Beautiful?
So, just what makes a sentence “beautiful”? The label is, admittedly, pretty subjective. But I’ve done my best to set up some standards for choosing these 50 breathtaking phrases:
- Beautifully phrased, but also full of truth: It’s one thing for a sentence to read like a pretty line of poetry, but I wanted to choose sentences that say something anyone could find truth in—sentences that speak to the human experience or convey emotions that we can all relate to.
- Beautiful and poignant even without context: In keeping with the first requirement, I chose sentences that are beautiful and impactful even without context. In other words, you don’t need to know anything about the story these sentences are pulled from in order to appreciate their beauty.
- Strictly one sentence: Each of these quotes is truly just one sentence, nothing more (which makes meeting the above requirement all the more impressive!).
- No more than one sentence per author: For the sake of variety, I didn’t include any author more than once (which made it quite a challenge to choose, considering how talented these writers are!).
50 Beautiful Sentences from Literature
So, without further ado, here are 50 beautiful sentences from fiction:
1. “The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
—Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
2. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
—J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew“
3. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.”
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
4. “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
6. “Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
7. “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”
—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
8. “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
9. “A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.”
—Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
10. “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”
—Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
11. “Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders.”
—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
12. “Every person had a star, every star had a friend, and for every person carrying a star there was someone else who reflected it, and everyone carried this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.”
—Orhan Pamuk, Snow
13. “Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.”
—Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
14. “She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.”
—Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
15. “You’re an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, Small Avalanches and Other Stories
16. “It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.”
Jim Harrison, Julip: A Novel
17. “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
—Toni Morrison, Sula
18. “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”
—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
19. “Each time someone dies, a library burns.”
—Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
20. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
21. “They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
22. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
—Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
23. “It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
24. “Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.”
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22
25. “For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”
—Colm Tóibín, The Master
26. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
27. “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
28. “Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great grandmother to twins.”
—Edward P. Jones, “Tapestry” from All Aunt Hagar’s Children
29. “And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.”
—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
30. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
—Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
31. “He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
32. “How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.”
—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
33. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
—William Gibson, Neuromancer
34. “They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”
—John Irving, The World According to Garp
35. “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
36. “Time is the longest distance between two places.”
—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
37. “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
38. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelio Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon that his father took him to discover ice.”
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
39. “She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
40. “She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”
—Neil Gaiman, Stardust
41. “Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.”
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
42. “The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
43. “And the rest is rust and stardust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
44. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
45. “In fact, this particular memory is one she’ll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Ralph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparking, shyly learning to dance.”
—Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad
46. “The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.”
—Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
47. “The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none.”
—Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
48. “Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”
—Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
49. “There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
50. “The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons—it was systemic and it was complete.”
—Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
Poetic Sentences
It takes a gifted writer to bring a one-of-a-kind story to life—but some writers have the special ability to tell entire stories and move their readers to tears or laughter in just a single sentence.
If you aspire to create breathtaking sentences like the writers mentioned in this post have, check out our tips for improving your writing skills. With regular practice, you’ll soon be on your way to creating gorgeous prose of your own!
Do you have a favorite sentence from literature? Share it with us in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:
- 15 Ernest Hemingway Quotes on Life, Death, and Writing
- The Most Memorable Great Gatsby Quotes, Explained
- 15 Unforgettable Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About the World We Live In
- 75 Quotes About Writing for When You Feel Like Putting the Pen Down
As a blog writer for TCK Publishing, Kaelyn loves crafting fun and helpful content for writers, readers, and creative minds alike. She has a degree in International Affairs with a minor in Italian Studies, but her true passion has always been writing. Working remotely allows her to do even more of the things she loves, like traveling, cooking, and spending time with her family.
