• As you work on your writing, think about the impact your work will have on other people. While we often look at the big picture, crafting a novel that we hope will move people, the sentences we write can be what a reader takes away from it all. Sure, when you remember a book, you will think of the overall plot, the actions and personalities of the characters, and the place the book took place. But as you read, there will sometimes be sentences that make you stop and say "wow", or just make you think.

    As I read, I often try and capture these sentences. I will mark the pages and go back to them later to add it to a word document that catalogs some of my favorite passages. I figured these would be a great thing to share here, as we aspiring writers may hope to one day write sentences that can compare to those written by the great authors that have come before us. Read these passages and feel free to send me some of your favorites.

    From Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

    And now to tell my story as if I had had the very sight they had denied me... is it not as if you told a cripple's story and never said he was lame, or told how a man betrayed secret but never said it was after twenty hours of torture? And I saw all in a moment how the false story would grow and spread and be told all over the earth; and I wondered how many of the other sacred stories are just such twisted falsities as this.

    From Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

    It most often happens that you argue hotly only because you can't understand what precisely your opponent wants to prove.

    From Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

    From Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

    I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have.

    From A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

    When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

    Finally, from The Man Who Ate the 747 by Ben Sherwood

    We chase wild dreams and long for all that eludes us, when the greatest joys are within our grasp, if we can only recognize them.

    These are just a few of the quotes I found in my document. Unfortunately, it seems I never logged any of the quotes from the novel Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, as that book is magical. Every page seemed to evoke another captivating image with words that can only be described as beautiful. Feel free to share your own quotes!