The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

When I picked this book up I was expecting something deeply intellectual, but it is a lovely accessible tale told in vignettes about a boy who delivers telegrams during wartime and learns about love and loss.

The daytime school student and nighttime telgraph messenger brought his bicycle to a dynamic skidding halt, dropped the contraption and hurried to the fence as if there he would discover something extremely fleeting and apt to be lost if he did not hurry.

"We're poor, always have been--my father was a great man. He was not a successful man. He didn't make any more money than what we needed--ever."

Not exactly sentence stalking, but I love this!

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Your manuscript on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already--worthy ones, more edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones.

You can easily get so confused writing a thiry-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often "written" with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table's edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over rows with full hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet.