sentences

I haven't really written in a while. But I like sharing quotes. I'm looking forward to reading Annie Dillard's A Writing Life. But for now, here's a quote from her on writing from An American Childhood.

But like anyone, I could recall and almost see fleet torn fragments of a scene: a raincoat sleeve's wrinkling, a blond head bending, red-lighted rain falling on asphalt, a pesteringly interesting pattern in a cordovan shoe, which rises and floats across the face I want to see. I perceived these sights as scraps that floated like blowing tissue across some hollow interior space, some space at the arching roof of the rib cage, perhaps. I swerved to study them before they slid away.

I hoped that the sentences would nail the blowing scraps down. I hoped that the sentences would store scenes like rolls of film, rolls of film I could simply reel off and watch. But of course, the sentences did not work that way. The sentences suggested scenes to the imagination, which were no sooner repeated than envisioned, and envisioned just as poorly and just as vividly as actual memories.