"I like to think of myself as an ethical person, but there is almost nothing I wouldn’t, in some sense, sell."

"For instance: There are close family relationships that I have cut off, without even really deciding to, for years at a time. I sold them for stability and mental peace — transactions I think of with doubt and unhappiness every single day. This would seem to suggest that I love my stability and mental peace above all else. And yet I sell those too, at cut-rate prices, again and again...."

That's Sam Anderson, commenting (last May) on a single sentence from a novel. The sentence, from "Nicotine" by Nell Zink is "You can’t understand the modern world if you can’t imagine selling what you love best." The idea of having somebody briefly comment on a single sentence is a good one (a bit like my "Gatsby Project"), and it's a regular feature — "New Sentences" — in the NYT that I'd never noticed before. I just happened to run across it today because I was doing a search on "Nell Zink" (after noticing I'd never finished another novel of hers that I'd put in my Kindle). I was looking at my Kindle to see if "Fire and Fury" had arrived (though it's still a few minutes before the promised release time). I said I'd read that for you today, so it's not the day to be reading Nell Zink books, though I'm sure Nell Zink books contain far more sentences worthy of contemplation — beginning with "You can’t understand the modern world if you can’t imagine selling what you love best" — than "Fire and Fury," which I still must wait 4 minutes to begin to read.