Searching for the perfect sentence

My invitation to readers to send in a delightful sentence produced some winning ones.

But first, a few words about sentences. Stanley Fish, in his book "How to Write a Sentence," quotes the writer Annie Dillard:

"When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow."

The words "wield" and "digs" communicate power, the quality we all should seek in the most important words we choose: verbs.

A Minneapolis reader, Sharon Wagner, delights in this passage, from the book "The Beautiful Ones," by Silvia Moreno-Garcia:

"Nina was unable, for the life of her, to form a reply. The words withered in her mouth."

"Withered" — a vivid, original and arresting image.

Ain't we got fun?

And this, from an unpublished novel by Keith Kuhn, a high-school science teacher at St. Michael-Albertville:

"Behind a tilting wooden picnic table, a sad family stood, looking like they were staring into the back of the camera lens, searching for help beyond the aperture."

Savor that.

And this, discovered in a travel magazine by my college classmate Bruce Sloane:

That demonstrates the importance of the sound of words – the internal rhymes, the repetition, the music of language.

A favorite of mine comes from the TV series "Downton Abbey," in which the actor Maggie Smith, as the imperious Dowager Countess, utters some of the most delicious lines in all of drama. This line punctuates a confrontation in which she stoops to conquer her hyper-ethical rival for control of a local hospital:

"Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?"