“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time, Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
— Opening lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The author, Gabriel Garcia Marchez, passed away yesterday.
Apt. 11d 
I posted the first sentence of this on my own FB page immediately after hearing the news.
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One of my favorite lines from “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”:
“The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”
Found here: http://salvoblue.homestead.com/wings.html
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I completely don’t get this stuff.
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You’re not alone. I get that particular sentences may be striking, but it reminds me of Florence King’s description of Updike: “Updike’s style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.”
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