Sentences

The dregs of a slight spring cold have ignited into a full-blown sinus infection, so I am home, trying to sleep away the sensation that my face is being pressed, with great enthusiasm, into a concrete wall. 

This was the perfect thing to leaf through when I was awake -- a list at The American Scholar of the ten best sentences. (Via) Of the sentences they picked, I liked the bonus eleventh the best:

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
—Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

The real treasures are in the comments though.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
—John Updike

That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.
—Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The shorter ones are appealing to me today, but there are many treasures at the link.