Hill's Sentences of the Month

Anna Karina reading a Paul Eluard poem
in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville

1. "Anyone with a house full of books has been asked the inevitable question: "Have you read all of these?" The real answer, of course, is no, because half the appeal of books is promise. But the question is annoying anyway."

This is my good and long time friend Mike Johnston on the blog that he makes his living from, The Online Photographer. He is one of the most curious people I know--about things, that is--I don't mean that he's strange. I love the truth he gets to in this sentence. I've read most of the books in my own library, but there are a lot that I haven't read, but that are still some of my favorites because of the "promise" they hold for when I finally do get around to them.

2. "Every generation gets the self-help guru it deserves." From Rebecca Mead's profile in The New Yorker on kind-of creepy "mind hack" guru Timothy Ferris.

This sentence is a version of another famous sentence that I can't remember, but it's a great twist on it. I love the way the word "deserves" suggests that all generations are at fault somehow, and part of their punishment is that they have to endure ego-maniacal self-promoters like Timothy Ferris. You can tell, just from this image below, what kind of person he must be. The generations sins he has been sent for must be very bad indeed.

Timothy Ferris

3. "These guys weren't sitting around bull-****ing. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs." Bob Dylan in his autobiography Chronicles, describing his reaction to first hearing Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Ice-T.

Dylan's book is a real mess. If it were a final draft in my class, I would give it a C, but he comes up with lines like "throwing horses over cliffs" all the time and they knock me out. They sound like wise old sayings that have been around forever but that have never been said until Dylan uttered them.