The website Lit Hub has a genre of posts they do from time to time, "close readings" of various texts.  Some of them are good, some more meh.  But the texts they choose are always worth reading.  Here's a great one, from Shirley Jackson--I don't know if I would agree that this is the best of all time, but it's good. 

Shirley Jackson is hugely under-appreciated these days, but making a minor sort of comeback, which is maybe the best anyone can hope for these days for a person who wrote actual books on actual paper.  The beginning of her The Haunting of Hill House is also incredible:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

There's a great close reading of it as well (not from Lit Hub, but from another site).

I have other paragraphs I love.  I can remember the beginning of Paul Auster's Moon Palace which is breathtaking, and maybe also Rick Bass's "In the Loyal Mountains", those are two that still blow me away.

Here's Auster: 

It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance only a short time before, but eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life.

The whole story to come is wrapped up in this paragraph, like a ball of yarn set to unspool before our eyes.  And the declarative structure of the sentences, the velocity of the prose (he's sometimes been the best at that--"For one whole year he did nothing but drive, traveling, back and forth across America as he waited for the money to run out"--that's the first sentence of The Music of Chance), the final incantatory repetition, the surprising unveiling of events to come, all of this portends that something ominous and mythic is going to be told to us here.

Here's the Bass:

My girlfriend and I drove my uncle around the Texas hill country during what was to be the last year of his life. We did not know then that they were his last days -- though he did, I think -- and we always had a good time. I'm married now, and this girl we drove around with, Spanda, is not my wife, and I was never fooled into believing that one day she might be. All this happened a long time ago; I have been saying it's been ten years for so long that by now it is truthfully more like twenty.

There are subtle shifts throughout this paragraph--the unfolding? shifting? meaning of "we", for instance, and the way the begins by being about the events, then ends by being about the telling of the events. And the whole is weighted with several large events, like a looming storm front, of death and relationship ending.  It's always got me.

  +++  

Now, for something entirely different: Here's a paragraph from Martha Gellhorn's article after she returned from Dachau--one of the first articles published in the world on the Holocaust:

We have all seen a great deal now; we have seen too many wars and too much violent dying; we have seen hospitals, bloody and messy as butcher shops; we have seen the dead like bundles lying on all the roads of half the earth. But nowhere was there anything like this. Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged, naked nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German soldiers who had been found in this camp. They were shot at once when the American Army entered. And for the first time anywhere one could look at a dead man with gladness.

This has echoes of Hemingway, of course, from A Farewell to Arms: 

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

But it is not Hemingway, and it is not cynicism fuelled by grief, it is moral outrage fuelled by grief, and that makes a world of difference. But nowhere was there anything like this. The refusal of comparisons, the recognition not just of physical horror but moral horror, the refusal, on moral grounds, of any mercy to the perpetrators--so much of the future of thinking about atrocity is in Gellhorn's words here.  It's wrong to call it beautiful, but it seems to me to get at something the angels would say. In comparison, for all his pity, all his poetry, and it is real, Hemingway still sounds cool, and defeated.

Anyway, sorry to harass you to no point, except to say that sentences as powerful as many of these are, are worthy of being read again and again.  If you have favorite paragraphs, I'd love to hear from you about them.