A mere sentence with about ten words can either inflict a lot of injury to one's soul or inject them with a lot of happiness. If a statement can create imagery in the minds of readers, it goes without saying that this sentence must comprise a language which is very simple but at the same time very powerful.
Till now, I am content to say I have read less than 1.0% of this world's literature. However, the flow of writing that some of these authors exhibited have left me spellbound. So, I decided to conduct an experiment. I randomly flipped through the pages of some of the most famous novels (that were within half a meter radius, forgive me I am lazy) and plucked out a statement from there... and now you are about to see how even a random statement written by these wonderful people has so much efficacy.
"The first two dances, however, brought a return of distress; they were dances of mortification."
-Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
"The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."
-Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
"Dawn made itself felt in a gathering whiteness eastward and over the river and an intermittent cheeping in the near-by trees."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
" Now, is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or for ill."
- Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of The Baskervilles)
"And far away from the South, beyond the white woods of the birches of Nimbrethil, from the coast of Arvernien and the mouths of Sirion, came rumour of the Havens of the Ships."
- J.R.R. Tolkien (The Children Of Hurin)
"I dreamed a lot, and most of it I only remember as a hodge podge of images, snippets of visual memory flashing in my head like cards in a Rolodex..."
-Khaled Hosseini ( The Kite Runner )
"You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."
-Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol )
And from my absolute favorite children's book:
"They are forbidden by Peter to look in the least like him, and they wear the skins of bears slain by themselves, in which they are so round and furry that when they fall they roll."
-James Matthew Barrie (Peter And Wendy)
Perhaps the bunch of statements I have just made you put up with make no sense when they stand alone from the actual text. But, what delights me is the sweetness of language and the imagery they form in my head. I think the characteristic of a good author is that even when you do isolate such descriptive lines from their paragraphs, you can still imagine a great deal. That's why the likes of Rowling, Lewis, Stevenson, Dickens (and so on and so forth) make so much sense; that is how they won over Readers.
Westlife once sang,
"And Words are all I have to take your Heart away."
I believe.
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