Tag Archives: lost and found

Lost & Found Round-Up

It may not rank high on the list of devastating epidemics like childhood obesity, or our culture’s willingness to give Madonna enough rope with which to “reinvent” but not hang herself, it is nonetheless a genuine bummer whenever somebody loses a sentence.

Wiley creatures these words strung together with intention, and in need of constant supervision, as they will get sucked under a passing bus as easily as they’ll lay docile on the blank page. Thankfully, in cases of the former, there are goodhearted souls out there, who upon locating such parent-less prose, will dust it off, coax it into their memories, and then deliver it to me at Lost & Found Sentences, Inc.

So if you’ve had the hard luck of losing a sentence recently, here’s a round-up of what I’ve received in the last few months. Found in the darndest of places too, like turkey chili,  a wig, an empty milk jug, can of pepper spray, a footprint, pigeon vomit.

“Her finger traced the saucer’s hairline crack as the poison took effect.”

“Trust the gut the doctor didn’t remove from you last night.”

“Seizing the moment, replied the swinging elbows and knees.”

“Razors tied together was his tinsel, the shuriken his Christmas star.”

“Take a knee, solider; take two knees if it makes you happy.”

“It was Friday, and that meant it was Gary’s turn to wear the special pants.”

“They tried passing the torch like oranges at summer camp, to disastrous results.”

“The scarf was curled up on the floor like a dead brown dog.”

“He’d had the pincer a day when they lopped it off and gave him a plate of beans in compensation.”

“He wore a shirt made from frosting after whipped cream went out of style.”

“His emotional baggage bulging inside his actual baggage, he threw both off the bridge that Mother built.”

“They dug him out of a frozen cornfield and sent him off in a suit and crooked smile.”

“They would stay the night, but on their own terms, in your pajamas, in your bed.”

“She’d meant to toss a pinch of salt over her shoulder, not the battle axe.”

“When he returned from the war the faces he saw were the open wounds he’d been unable to mend.”

“There were no second chances at this, his maniacal laugh had to be spot-on.”

“We weren’t certain who the thief was so we chopped everyone’s hands off.”

“He liked to wait until it was very quiet, and then the belt would come off.”

“Some made ill-fitting locks like marionettes, while others clapped as if afraid their hands might seal together.”

“Expecting the ‘job creators’ to regulate themselves is like asking a time bomb to defuse itself.”

 

Let me know if any of the above ring a bell. And if you’ve found a lost sentence, please leave it in the comments and be sure to include where you happened upon it. Thank you!

Lost And Found Sentences

So I’ve finally succumbed and joined the Twitter army (@bryanhilson, if you care to follow me). In the spirit of having enough content to throw against the virtual wall–if you don’t tweet several times a day you might as well not exist–I’ve come up with a new service for writers and non-writers alike.

Lost & Found Sentences is just that, a repository of sentences people have lost or purposely left behind, and that I’ve had the good fortune to have found lying in the street, an elevator, a parking lot, on the bottom of my shoe,  and engraved in the stake I used recently to kill a vampire. The point of collecting and sharing these sentences on Twitter is to let people know the words are there if they’ve lost them, or if perhaps they might be in need of a sentence for a project they’re writing or a conversation they’re having. Sometimes the right words strung together escape us in the moments we need them most, and so I think it’s nice to have a place where people can go in moments of literary or linguistic crisis.

The idea is to not only post the sentences on Twitter but to also house them here on the blog for people to search through and take, if any suit their needs. And of course once you’ve taken ownership of a sentence you have the right to modify it as you see fit. However, if you do choose to take a sentence from the collection I ask that you replace it with one that you’ve found. Don’t worry, sentences are everywhere; people can be a bit careless with them and you’ll be surprised where you find them once you start looking.

CURRENT SENTENCES IN THE LOST AND FOUND (Need a sentence-take-a-sentence-take-a-sentence-leave-a-sentence):

She’d let him keep the cat but not the dog; the dog would live and knew too much.

When Mister Bag starts to argue with you, that’s when it’s time to worry.

Your fingers are your own problem, Clarabelle.

We clean our own coats in this house; blood, bone and all.

He had a funny feeling the drool dangling from his lip wasn’t his.

They threw the hindquarters to the silent majority in their cages.