Bishop Pero Fernandes

"The locals, impressed with the glorious civilization the bishop represented and eager to absorb it in its totality, prompty ate him."

Well great goddamn. Not only is that a sentence, that's almost a life story, it say everything. it tells the before the after the cause the consequences. It's truly brilliant. Whish I knew who wrote it. I think I cut the clipping from an inflight magazine.

Not only serpents but stones

I hate shakespeare. But this was a great sentence.

"If we live in language at all, it is only after we really live, after we live outside language, as mute as not only oceans but mountains, not only serpents but stones."

One Very Hot Day

A terribly dry book on the Vietnam war. Not the best I've read by far, and not the worst, but in the middle of all the stiff language David Halberstam cuts loose for ONE SENTENCE.

"It had been a day and a night and a day again of terrible and hysterial bitterness and fear and death -of fear being passed among them in the confusion like a great contagious disease, of men groaning and dying and screaming in both languages, of Americans shouting to get those sons of bitches moving, the Vietnamese saying again and again it was not the right time, the must pick the right moment, the Americans saying, no goddamn it now, or we'll all die in this stinking wet hell-hole, and the Vietnamese saying not now, we must wait, take cover, and the Americans shouting, there is no god-damn cover, and always the wailing and the shivering in the background."

...On Howlin' Wolf

http://www.bubblegum-machine.com/week108.html A fairly hip MP3 blog. It's editor, (who shall remain nameless as I assume that is their wish) wrote the following about The one and only Howlin' Wolf.

"His songs came from that place where the soul of a man never dies; where highway 49 meets highway 61 and men barter with the devil while smoking unfiltered cigarettes -he was the backdoor man and the bullcow..."

Hesse

Steppenwolf is superior to Siddartha, but Siddartha for all it's Buddhist trappings became the more classic tome.

"The devil is the spirit and we are his unhappy children; we have fallen our of nature and hang suspended in space."

The Devil and Sonny Liston

It's hard to Overrate Nick Tosches, but some hipsters manage. I quote his bography of Sonny Liston here, when he was at what I expect post-humously will be considered his peak.

"I did not know that it would also reveal the forces of another, unexplored darkness, an underworld unto itself and I did not know, above all , that it would reveal a soul that, even amid the darkness in which it dwealt, eluded all concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong, of light and darkness themselves."