Two crackerjack sentences from the April 17, 2023 New Yorker. 

The first, from Anthony Lane, touches on a pet peeve (a sin which decry but have probably committed too). It´s a devastating book review of a Georges Vigarello's "History of Fatigue" -- normally I wouldn't approve of reviewing a book just to tear it apart but the review is so good (in pointing out everything missing from the Vigarello book, he actually writes an appealing essay that doesn't depend exclusively on his vicious wit), and it sounds like the book sounds like it deserves it.

p 59-60: "... in what, more than once, Vigarello calls “the onset of modernity.”

When was that, by the way? Was there a particular wet afternoon in March, 1744, when mankind, drumming its fingers on the kitchen table, and fed up with the creaky old ways of thinking and behaving, decided to get modern?

And from the review of a collection of the complete work of Charles Portis, Casey Cep writes:

66--"...the obstacles Portis's characters face are allergic to allegory and symbolism; their rewards, even at their most fantastical, are humble and fleeting. In a Portis novel, when you ride off into the sunset you have to make camp in the dark."

 From Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Record , p. 116 

This one isn't so much stellar at the sentence level as as the level of meaning, but it gave my brain the same frisson, a spark that lit across the hyphen when I went from "huh?" to "oooooh!!!":

"The novel actually provided the bourgeoisie with both a substitute for and reformulation of initiation rites--that is, for access to experience in general." 

and, p. 120, a great sentence (a bit of contextual prose first, the sentence in question is the last).

"But the principal defect in Bertillon's anthropometric method was its purely negative quality. It permitted the exclusion, at the moment of identification, of individuals not corresponding to the data, but not the positive verification that two identical series of data referred to a single individual.' The unavoidably elusive nature of the individual, chased out through the door by means of quantification, was reentering by the window."

 From Otessa Moshfegh's collection of short stories "Homesick for Another World."

p 42--"He was just like me: anything good made him want to die. That's a characteristic some smart people have."

p. 73--"But the spirit of the place mae me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say that there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials... I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it--I've never been very clear on that distinction."

p. 102--"The place was full of fat ladies and their men, who looked wrinkled and haggard, heaps of mashed potaoes disappearing under the crooked awnings of their thick mustaches."

p. 164--"The moon was just a sliver, a comma, a single eyelash in the dark, starless sky." Me: it's not easy to come up with a new way to describe the moon, one that jumps out from the page and from all the history of clichés about the moon.

p. 195--"We crossed into Nevada, the blank desert like a spot on a map that had been rubbed away with an eraser." 

p. 204--"The outer length of the thigh, where the muscles separated, and the inside, where the fat spread, were like two sides of a coin I wnated to flip." 

p. 231--A narrator as he sets off on a ridiculous mission to win the heart of a woman he's decided he is in love with after a brief encounter in a furniture market. "Mine was not the usual self-pity, but the kind of fearful admiration one feels watching footage of young tribal boys performing dangerous rites of passage."

 De "El material humano" de Rodrigo Rey Rosa

149-150--Dentro de un sueño, ve un volumen de ensayos escritos por Paul Bowles que el mismo había traducido, "Leo en voz alta la primera oración: La música es la organización más sónica de los sonidos. Una voz de mujer (¿Alexandra?) pregunta: "¿Masónica?", y se ríe. 

176--"la reflexión de que tal vez hay que ser un poco inmoral para ser una persona moral al menos en ciertos aspectos, para comprender 'el mecanismo' de la moral." 

From Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum (a short story collection)

Since it's a Kindle book I can't give page numbers.

From "The Irish Wedding": "The tractor slowed them down, but so did Sadie's sense that in the dark Ireland was making itself up as it went along."

from "Proof": "David was not superstitious except in this way: he liked to feel lucky...he never crossed his fingers or made wishes, but every day was an omen for itself....The sun was shining in Scotland, clouds like storybook sheep above them though the local sheep were goatish, angular, weird. It was a good day, which meant it would be a good ay, which meant every day for a while might be good."

from "Mistress Mickle All At Sea": "The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone."

and

"Now she thought, Icarus, Newton's apple, David Bowie, impossible beautiful falling things."

from "A Walk-Through Human Heart": "She knew her maternal love would always be edged with meanness, so as to matter: sometimes you needed a blade to get results."

and

"A junk shop, a proper one, was like walking into someone else's disordered brain, which operated on this lie: it was good to collect ephemera because if things were worth saving--if a volume of Reader's Digest Condensed Books with abridgements of Ngaio Marsh could persist--why not all of us?" (God I love the rhythm of that sentence, the way the hyphen takes the reader into the trivial and arbitrary and then she surprise smacks you with the Big Universal) 

from "The Souvenir Museum"

"Souvenir: a memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened."

and

"Her actual heart found the door behind which her metaphorical heart hid; heart dragged heart from its bed and pummeled it."

And for a change, I thought I'd dissect a bad sentence.

From Mexican Gothic, on Kindle so I can't say a page # but it's in chapter 9.  Noemí is a young single woman in 1950s Mexico. She likes to flirt and her the author Sellers-García describes her disinclination towards marriage: "Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal..." The paragraph goes on and ends "Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing desires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment." This sentence had been underlined by 1067 readers, presumably not to point out how bad it is, but I think it gets to the problem of the novel.

The novel is told in the 3rd person, but the narrator is Noemí--everything is seen and judged through her eyes. This is evident in the opening of the paragraph--Marriage could hardly be like...(this is Noemí's conclusion). But the end of that paragraph is something that Silvia Sellers-García knows, but Noemí should not. To write a character you have to know everything about that character (or maybe not, but clearly Sellers-García does), including their motivations, conscious and unconscious, but the character can't know these things about his or herself, the reader needs to be allowed to discover them (unless there is an omniscient narrator who is separate from the character). It's psychologically inverisimilar, but more importantly, it's dull for the reader. 

 From Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (really could excerpt the whole book. One gem of a sentence after another).

"Later, I would sit in empty churches and keep the Eucharist company. This was pleasant; it was communing with an idea. It was much like a girl spending a long afternoon brushing her hair and polishing her nails and looking at herself in the mirror-marveling at herself, except I was marveling at my mind, at my ability to swoon or be astonished, at my capacity to understand metaphor better than I understood anything else. I was combing my brain down to my feet."

"Religion trains you like roses--it installs automation int he arms and legs, even in the mouth." 

Summer at the pool. 

"Beach bodies had a stillness, a turning, a restless luxuriation--an introduction of every part of the body to the sun. They stretched on their white plastic chairs. They stretched and stretched. Legs and arms, columns of backbones, necks. Even their long tan lineage stretched, back to some previous life as a basking animal. Their hair grew half an inch; their fingernails; the future."

"Time slowed down, and stretched, and exposed every part of itself to the sun. The high dive meant leaping off the edge of a moment and trusting the next one would catch you." 

"If a cathedral is a spiraling, infinite library of human prayers, it is also a palace of free association." 

"A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth." 

"I feel the jolt you feel when alternate universes, which usually run parallel and unseen alongside you, leap out of black water and crisscross like dolphins over your trajectory."

"I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in the place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am... I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices....On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself." 

And then just the perfect Dorothy Parker-like minimalist wit.

"He was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through."

"'Is it ADD?' she [her mother] asks me. 'Your father gave you all ADD, you know.' Sensing that this is not entirely fair, she adds graciously, 'And then I gave you ADD as well.'"

Upon finding semen on the bedspread in a hotel. "'Mom, no. We're not calling the police.' 'Can¡t we call the police...just a little bit?'"

Going hunting with her dad and brother: "He was participating in an age-old ritual, where a boy becomes a man and a man becomes a psycho."

"Don Pablo's was a fake Mexican restaurant that prided itself on the sizzlingness of its food." and "The Don Pablo's in Cincinnati was a large converted factory, so it looked vaguely like a nightclub where people went to have wrong ideas about Mexico." 

 From The New Yorker, June 14, 2021. "The Echoing Song"--by Adam Kirsch. 

¨We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early 1930s" (that's the good part, the sentence continues to explain that that was when Milman Parry published his thesis, now widely accepted, that Homer never existed.