Description that Grabs You

As an active bookmobile participant and Highlights fan from way back, I love to read.  I especially love well-written copy that’s so specific and so revealing that you can almost touch, see, smell or hear what’s being described.  Here are some recent favorites:

From Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge:

* It was as if marriage had been a long, heavy and complicated ordeal, and now there was this lovely and light dessert.

* Years later, the situation squeezed Olive so hard she felt like a  package of vacuum-packed coffee.

* For the first time in years, Cliff thought about God, who seemed like a piggy bank that Harmon had stuck up on a shelf and had now brought  down to look at with a new considering eye.

* The appetites of the body are private battles.

From Ron Hall and Denver Moore’s Same Kind of Different as Me:

* The surgeons filed in, looking grim, and I wondered bizarrely is they teach appropriate facial decorum in medical school.

* I could see through his eyes that little pieces of his heart was break off while we was standin there.

* He stood away from anyone – which did not surprise us since the others always treated him like a bad dog on a long chain.

* When all you doin is bringin in the Man’s cotton, ain’t nowhere you got to be at ‘cept where you at

And from Lynne Truss’ classic Eats, Shoots & Leaves:

* He saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability.

* Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons or shriveling question marks on the garden path under the powerful magnifying glass.

And the story that makes this last book’s title such a classic:

A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.  “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit.  The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. “I’m a panda,” he says at the door.  “Look it up.”  The waiter turns to the relevant entry, and sure enough, finds an explanation.  “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

What are some of your favorite well-worded descriptions? Please share yours, and why you like them, in the comments below.

Image courtesy of From The Left.