Literary Truth

Don’t you love it when you’re reading for pleasure and one sentence or two strikes you as so well-said that you have to write it down?

That happened to me this week as I began March by Geraldine Brooks. (I should have known there might be some good writing in the book since it did win the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.)

I stopped reading to mark the following, and made a vow to myself that I will use the word “knopped” in at least one sentence this week:

“But I do not immediately close my lap desk. I let it lie across my knees and continue to watch the clouds, their knopped masses blackened now in the almost lightless sky. No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation.” (p. 4)