What makes a sentence great? Is it the way it sounds? The idea it contains? The emotion it evokes? What is the strange alchemy that makes a handful of words survive long after the people who wrote them are gone?  There are, of course, thousands of contenders for the superlative of “greatest sentence,” pulled from poetry, novels, speeches, letters, and declarations. And of course, the quotes that resonate most deeply with us are inevitably personal. There are also countless sentences we will never know because their writers had the misfortune of living in the wrong ...Read More