Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Re-reading this for school and liking it more than I did the first time around, maybe because I'm older and understand what the book is doing more.
Some other contender sentences:
Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.
This seems familiar enough—but don't relax.
Fungi have always been recalcitrant to the iron cage of self-replication.
("recalcitrant" really is just a great word)
But wait: who would want to hear about the world from a worm?
(Me!!! I would)
(There is little that enrages your average white supremacist more than publicly pointing out that they are using the same rhetoric as the Bad Guys in Indiana Jones.)
"'The actual truth', Jonathan Katz's newsletter The Racket
Excellent use of the parenthetical aside.
Social change will come through seeds growing in well-prepared soil—and it is we, like the earthworms, who prepare the soil.
The Real World of Technology, Urusula Franklin
Re-reading this for school after it became a personal touchstone around 2015. It's nice to return to it. Love to see the "would you love me if I was a worm" meme responded to so affirmatively, also feels nice alongside the Tsing sentence on hearing about the world from a worm.
In the past, he’s been a semi-professional footballer, a rock musician, a comic-con cosplayer, and, perhaps disappointingly, a professor of economics.
"How Did the Far Right Get So Weird?", Richard Hames for Novara Media
Never turn down a chance to dunk on economics.
It was Richard Spencer, whose road to ruin I myself helped pave, who was able to leverage its ideas as ideological backing and distill them to be accessible to the intellectual potatoes that were the alt-right’s footsoldiers.
"Making God", Emily Gorcenski on her blog
"whose road to ruin I myself helped pave"! "intellectual potatoes"! You can sense even with the gravity of the blog post's focus Emily was having a pretty good time.
A runner-up sentence: