Writers work with words, arranging them into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs that, we hope, carry some sort of emotional weight. Individual sentences are designed to perform various tasks, from appealing to the senses to describing action to illuminating character--and sometimes, when we're on our game, all at once.
Then sometimes sentences are just a delight to the mind. I like to think I've accomplished this a few times over the course of many books. Pat Conroy, however, does it all the time, which is why he's Pat Conroy and the rest of us are not.
His books are thick and sometimes a little sudsy, very Southern, full of asides and stories within stories. I'm currently reading an advance copy of South of Broad, which comes out in mid-September from Doubleday. On page 154, I found this sentence, which begs to be shared--but not out loud:
Recently, my mother threw a drink in my face while we were arguing the place of colons in an English sentence: Mother thought of them as elegant pauses and an artful way to let a sentence breathe; I thought of them as ostentatious.
I'm convinced he sat chuckling over the keyboard as he composed it. It would be lost in a third-person narrative, but since the words and composition are those of the first-person narrator, it's a small gem.
