Comments on: Things Vital to the Honor of Human Life

Things Vital to the Honor of Human Life

blahblahblah — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:18:15 -0800

"do others have favorite signature passages in books they love — a sentence or two that seem to convey the essence of a complex, beautiful work?" after giving his own example from To The Finland Station. Hundreds respond, often with some wonderful passages (as well as some not so wonderful ones). Any examples from the hive mind?

By: radiosilents

radiosilents — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:25:29 -0800

"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".

By: radiosilents

radiosilents — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:27:48 -0800

also, possibly "if you choose to search the dusty pile of leaves, turn to page 84. to leave via the door on the west wall, turn to page 27."

By: escabeche

escabeche — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:35:13 -0800

"…the library, the dead core of my education, the white, silent kernel of every empty Sunday I had spent trying to ravish the faint charms of economics, my sad and cynical major." (from the first chapter of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon. This doesn't really convey the essence of the novel but it does convey the essence of MC's prose style.

By: escabeche

escabeche — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:37:35 -0800

And this sums up Richard Brautigan for me: "The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, "Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper, " and put the coin in my hand, but never came back."

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:41:38 -0800

For me, a passage from Fernandez-Armesto's Civilizations, a rather and involved poetic book about how environment shapes culture, came to mind. It recapitulates the book elegantly and in minature.

[Buenos Aires] was a frontier capital, when Argentina was an estuary and the pampa a palatinate. Everything in the environment was daunting, every view limitless - so vast as to be practically indistinguishable from the blur of blindness and numbness, along the sea-wide river, across the ocean-wide sea, into the apparently endless plain. A ride away lived the people the citizens called savages. Here, to be convincing, civilization had to be exaggerated.

By: dhammond

dhammond — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:51:51 -0800

It's all in the game.

By: bonefish

bonefish — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:53:31 -0800

The first sentence of any James Michener or Tom Robbins novel seems to convey the essence of the, er, complex beautiful work...

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:54:16 -0800

It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day's breath, more than dark strength — it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with years' pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease-black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing, hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant — perhaps the true turn of the sunset — that is wine to you, wine and comfort. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

By: barnacles

barnacles — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:54:58 -0800

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

By: paladin

paladin — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:58:06 -0800

Yes, Neuromancer, but when was the last time you saw static on a TV screen? All I ever see is a flat blue screen anymore.

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:58:12 -0800

On the fiction side, from Rushdie's Midnight's Children:

No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black (there is no roof) the stars are green the widow is green but her hair is black as black. The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s hair has a centre parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow’s arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow’s arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow’s hand curls round them green and black...

..the passage continues, and really should be read aloud. I noticed it quoted in full as response #468 of the NY Times piece, and another couple good Midnight's Children quotes are #137 and #472. In considering it, this is not necessarily the most typical passage, or the most clever (''East is East but yeast is West," on an Indian character's like of European bread, comes to mind), but I feel like Rushdie's ability to harness language is in full display, as is, for those who have read it, a central issue of the book. And I always remembered it. So there.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:01:34 -0800

Will I look like a complete lame-ass for suggesting Richard Adams' Watership Down?

He raised his head and said, "Do you want to talk to me?" "Yes, that's what I've come for," replied the other. "You know me, don't you?" "Yes, of course," said Hazel, hoping he would be able to remember his name in a moment. Then he saw that in the darkness of the burrow the stranger's ears were shining with a faint silver light. "Yes, my lord," he said. "Yes, I know you."

* swallows his tears *

By: Bookhouse

Bookhouse — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:05:36 -0800

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief. Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetary Where Al Jolson is Buried" (Yeah, it's a short story, but the passage will pretty much stand in for her entire body of work.) It's too long to type out, but the passage of The Cold Six Thousand in which Wayne visits Cur-ti and Leroy is the triumph of James Ellroy's brutal minimalism.

By: bonefish

bonefish — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:07:37 -0800

"One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." - Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:08:56 -0800

...Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. --Virginia Woolf Now [Esteban] discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well. --Thornton Wilder

By: kid ichorous

kid ichorous — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:11:26 -0800

“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.” — Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine.

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:12:22 -0800

She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true. . . . You go from dream to dream inside me. —Also from Gravity's Rainbow

By: suedehead

suedehead — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:12:51 -0800

"It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you. She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace -- you can't identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze. Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years -- they all said so. ... She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky." -Don Delillo, Underworld

By: msalt

msalt — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:14:25 -0800

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." -- Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

By: dobbs

dobbs — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:14:59 -0800

One of my favorite openings to any book and one that sets the tone of the book so well (as well as the tone of the author's life) is this simple sentence: The first thing I remember is being under something. Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye. And one of my favorite closing sentences is from Scott Spencer's Endless Love: And now for this last time, Jade, I don't mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.

By: Ironmouth

Ironmouth — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:15:52 -0800

Carl Sandburg's Lincoln, chapter 17 "America Wither--Lincoln Journeys to Washington." "America wither?' was the question, with headache and heartache in several million homes, as Lincoln began his winding journey to Washington. There congress had not yet, after canvass of electoral results, declared and certified him President-elect. There coming events were yet to unlock a box of secrets. In the hair-trigger suspense, General Scott was saying to an aide, 'A dog fight now might cause the gutters to run with blood.' And he was putting guards at doorways and vantage points to make sure of order when the electoral vote for President would be anvassed February 13. The high-priced lawyer, Rufus Choate, listening to foeign language operas in New York had told his daughter 'Interpret for me the libretto lest I dialate with the wrong emotion.' In the changing chaos of the American scene, people were dialating with a thousand different interpretations. Lincoln was to be, if he could manage it, the supreme interpeter of the violent and contradictory motives swaying the country, the labor pains of the nation. Only tall stacks of documents recording the steel of fact and the fog of dream could tell the intracate tale of the shaping of a national fate; of many newspapers North and South lying to their readers and pandering to party and special interests; of Southern planters and merchants $200,000,000 in debt to the North, chiefly to the money controllers of New York City; . . . . [Sandberg goes on here in a single sentence of three pages length constructed of hundreds of clauses set off by semi-colons to describe the scores of facts which added up to the troubled American scene.] He then closes: "Thus might run a jagged skech of the Divided House over which Lincoln was to be Chief Magistrate."

By: Rangeboy

Rangeboy — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:19:34 -0800

"He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn't really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." —Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

By: ddaavviidd

ddaavviidd — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:20:15 -0800

Yes, Neuromancer, but when was the last time you saw static on a TV screen? All I ever see is a flat blue screen anymore. take this as a good sign; digital signal has changed a cloudy day into blue sunny sky!

By: thatwhichfalls

thatwhichfalls — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:26:00 -0800

"Immediate action is the soul of war." - Gene Wolfe

By: dobbs

dobbs — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:26:33 -0800

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." posted by barnacles at 12:54 AM on March 10 [1 favorite +] [!] I've never made it past that line in the book. Even when I was a teen and read it I thought it so on the nose that I couldn't see myself getting through a whole book of it. Conversely, there's a story I recall reading the first sentence of ("Half her face was porcelain.") which I found so right that I never bothered to continue as I thought it could only go downhill from there. I can't say for certain, but it might have been written by Alan Moore.

By: rouftop

rouftop — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:27:20 -0800

"This must be Thursday. I never did get the hang of Thursdays."

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:29:45 -0800

Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Underworld. (No offense, suedehead and radiosilents.) The Satanic Verses is as boring as mud, too, but I haven't read Midnight's Children yet. People on that page sure do seem to like their Hunter S. Thompson and their Lolita, too. Wow. Not that I don't love the good Doctor, nor Nabokov, but aside from the Ayn Rand quote (good lord), those in particular came off as just painfully sophomoric. Quite a bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who's really much more quotable than I'd generally imagined. I do approve of that.

By: zoinks

zoinks — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:32:58 -0800

"Food? I don't want any food now. I want more of this feeling - fire and wings." - Jean Rhys (I know at least one other mefite likes that line.)

By: Rhaomi

Rhaomi — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:33:11 -0800

"Or in other words: shy from the sky. No answer lies there. It cannot care, especially for what it no longer knows. Treat that place as a thing unto itself, independent of all else, and confront it on those terms. You alone must find the way. No one else can help you. Every way is different. And if you do lose yourself at least take solace in the absolute certainty that you will perish." -- Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves Not exactly my worldview, but I thought this passage did a great job of summarizing the story -- both the labyrinth that it describes and the philosophy that it expresses.

By: empath

empath — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:35:46 -0800

to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind.

By: moonbird

moonbird — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:45:22 -0800

"The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life." Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

By: zadcat

zadcat — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:46:08 -0800

Frodo stood still, hearing far off great seas upon beaches that had long ago been washed away, and sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth.

By: cccorlew

cccorlew — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:47:08 -0800

You're taking it personal, it's just business and he's taking it personal. Sonny, it's all personal, and I learned it from him, the old man, the Godfather.

By: MidAtlantic

MidAtlantic — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:59:00 -0800

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort."

By: barnacles

barnacles — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:00:32 -0800

Yes, Neuromancer, but when was the last time you saw static on a TV screen? All I ever see is a flat blue screen anymore. Fair enough, paladin, but I refuse to stop loving that metaphor! Conjures up a grey sea day perfectly. Alright, I'll try again:

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.

By: PareidoliaticBoy

PareidoliaticBoy — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:17:12 -0800

When Neuromancer was written in 1984, a quarter century ago, television static was pretty prosaic. And damn you, barnacles! Both those opening passages also sprung to my own mind.

By: Oriole Adams

Oriole Adams — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:18:29 -0800

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!" Sleep Till Noon, Max Shulman

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:19:43 -0800

Fair enough, paladin, but I refuse to stop loving that metaphor! Conjures up a grey sea day perfectly. Except, how many people in the future are going to read that and imagine a clear blue sky?

By: showbiz_liz

showbiz_liz — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:20:22 -0800

This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live—for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live—for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. -Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:27:23 -0800

Those must have all been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any kind of cripple, would you? --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

By: kirkaracha

kirkaracha — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:28:07 -0800

"Everyone knows what's in Room 101." -- Nineteen Eighty-Four "We all got it comin', kid." -- Unforgiven "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing." -- The Sun Also Rises "Shut up and deal." -- The Apartment Al Swearengen in Deadwood:

Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back.

Quite a bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who's really much more quotable than I'd generally imagined. I do approve of that. Isn't it pretty to think so?

By: juv3nal

juv3nal — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:30:58 -0800

"Love," he says, "it makes one do great things." At first, I thought he was making fun of me, and I answered, with a certain annoyance, that I couldn't see the relationship. But, upon reflection, this remark of his seems above all inexplicable. How would he know of this hoped-for love (quasi-absurd and, in any case, secret) that I have barely acknowledged to myself? "Oh, but yes," he goes on in that voice of his that wavers constantly between low and sharp, "there is an obvious relationship: love is blind, that's well known. And, in any case, you mustn't laugh: being blind, that's sad." ARG, Djinn.

By: shucksitsjeremy

shucksitsjeremy — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:42:48 -0800

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later." -Paul Auster, City of Glass

By: futility closet

futility closet — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:53:33 -0800

"Five friends I had, and two of them snakes." -- Frederick Buechner, Godric

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:53:33 -0800

"So it goes." --Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

By: Sitegeist

Sitegeist — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:56:03 -0800

The fullness is in the Child’s moving away from me, in his stepping so lightly, so joyfully, naked, into his own distance at last as he fades in and out of the dazzle of light off the water and stoops to gather—what? Pebbles? Is that what his eye is attracted by now, the grayest, most delicately veined of them? Or has he already forgotten all purpose, moving simply for the joy of it, wading deeper into the light and letting them fall from his hands, the living and edible snails that are no longer necessary to my life and may be left now to return to their own, the useless pebbles that where they strike the ground suddenly flare up as butterflies, whose bright wings rainbow the stream.

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

By: Busithoth

Busithoth — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:57:17 -0800

"Poor Grendel's had an accident... So may you all." ––John Gardner

By: agentofselection

agentofselection — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:12:52 -0800

I always thought this one best summed up Gravity's Rainbow: Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slap water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. I decided to post it, clicked through, and was surprised to see that three other people had already posted quotes from GR. Weird.

By: t2urner

t2urner — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:25:35 -0800

That is the way with things: expectations reversed in matters of the heart; love, a victim of chance and fate; the thing we say we'll never do is the very thing, after all, we want to do most. Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

By: roombythelake

roombythelake — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:45:52 -0800

I remember reading Lord of the Flies and coming to the line "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill" and pausing for a moment as my whole understanding of the novel shifted, and thinking, wow, that sentence sort of encapsulates all that this book must be about. So it's not my best example, being neither from my favourite novel nor my favourite quotation from a novel, but it is a formative one in the sense that it was perhaps the first time in my life I realized a sentence could work that way, both participating in and standing outside a work, and representing all that it was about. I find the single sentence choices more interesting because they follow that idea. I think those posting longer passages (and I'm speaking more to the respondents on the NYTBR website than to my fellow mefites) are confusing what the original article is talking about: "a sentence or two that seem to convey the essence of a longer work" does not, to me, equal "favourite three paragraphs of pretty writing." Perhaps the example in the original article courted that problem by being such a long sentence in the first place? Oh, and cortex I ain't, but did the third person to post a reply on the NYTBR site post an excerpt from her own work??

By: Chasuk

Chasuk — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:48:05 -0800

"Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold." Gene Wolfe, I forget which short story, but I have never forgotten the words.

By: [expletive deleted]

[expletive deleted] — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:33:07 -0800

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. -The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

To this day, these closing lines are what comes to mind whenever I think of the American Dream. A bit of a cliché to be sure, but that's inevitable when the closing lines of such a great book are so memorable. Another great line from the book:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

By: bruceo

bruceo — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:34:23 -0800

One billow comes up from the kid's cigarette and Terry the Tramp says, "Hey, man, how about a cigarette?" He says it with a tone you have to hear to fully comprehend. It is the patented Hell's Angel tone of soft grinning menace, kind of like the tone the second-story man uses on the watchdog, "Come here, fel-la... (SO I CAN SQUASH YOUR HEAD WITH THIS BRICK)." He says it soft, but it stops the whole room like High Noon. "Hey, man, how about a cigarette?"

--Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

By: Free word order!

Free word order! — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:53:03 -0800

The last sentence of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. It spoils the book, so I won't write it here, but damn it is worth the journey.

By: allkindsoftime

allkindsoftime — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:59:23 -0800

"Cheshire Puss," Alice began... "would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends on where you want to to get to," said the cat. - Lewis Carroll "With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two." - Robert Louis Stevenson "But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist." - Madeleine L'Engle A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. - John Steinbeck "He's the sort of man who needs not millions, but the resolution of his idea." - Fyodor Dostoevsky It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance…. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. – Annie Dillard "Hang up philosophy! Useless philosophy can make a Juliet." - William Shakespeare Jean Valjean advanced, carefully avoiding the furniture. At the far end of the room he could hear the even, quiet breathing of the sleeping bishop. He was almost completely dressed in bed, because of the cold Basse-Alpes nights. His head was tilted back on the pillow in the unstudied attitude of sleep. His face was lit up with a vague expression of a contentment, hope, and happiness. It was almost a radiance, a luminous transparency, for this heaven was within him: it was his conscience. Jean Valjean stood in the shadow, erect, motionless, terrified. He had never seen anything like it. The moral world has no spectacle more powerful than this: a troubled, restless conscience on the verge of committing a crime, contemplating the sleep of a just man. -Victor Hugo I have at least a few hundred of these, harshly scribbled on scraps of paper, squirreled away in boxes and desk drawers and moleskines and the like. I have many hundreds more meticulously compiled in seemingly endless MS Word documents that I add to regularly. Most books I've read more than once have this passage underlined. And I have Google, proof that God loves me and wants me to be happy (as Benjamin Franklin said of beer). I grew convinced, at a young age, that any book worth reading has what I like to think of as the "exact center" of that book. A passage, sometimes even just one short sentence, that, on its own, describes acutely what the host of other words surrounding it are trying to convey. I believe that every great author has a central idea in mind - a theme, really - that could be summed up in at most a short paragraph, and in some form or another, in every great literary work - fiction or non, they have sewn that thought into the fabric of the larger story. That's how I read books, actually - searching for the exact center. It's not always easy to find, and sometimes I think I've found it, only later to discover on re-reading that I may have missed it entirely. And then some you see and you just know. It makes reading anything more of an endeavor, and I like it.

By: misteraitch

misteraitch — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:32:31 -0800

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia.

By: paddbear

paddbear — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:52:46 -0800

''And then you walk fearlessly like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part. The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.''

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

By: verstegan

verstegan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:54:16 -0800

Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Sauniere collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas. No, but seriously, I've always admired the passage in T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom where he describes the way that population pressure forced the Arab tribes into the desert and out again, like the heart pumping blood around the body. (I don't know whether this has any basis in historical fact, but what the hell, it's a wonderfully strong, sinewy piece of writing.) It's a very subtle passage too, because when you first encounter it, near the beginning of the book, it appears that Lawrence is writing as an outside observer, but by the time you reach the end of the book you realise that he isn't just writing about the Arabs, he's writing about himself: Nor then did the pressure cease: the inexorable trend northward continued. The tribes found themselves driven to the very edge of cultivation in Syria or Mesopotamia .. We see them wandering, every year moving a little further north or a little further east as chance has sent them down one or other of the wellroads of the wilderness, till finally this pressure drives them from the desert again into the sown, with the like unwillingness of their first shrinking experiment in nomad life. This was the circulation which kept vigour in the Semite body. There were few, if indeed there was a single northern Semite, whose ancestors had not at some dark age passed through the desert. The mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting social discipline, was on each of them in his degree. I find it interesting that the original NYT article was about a passage from a work of non-fiction (Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station) but the contributions from readers are overwhelmingly (95%+) taken from works of non-fiction. Perhaps the reason for this is that great non-fiction stylists like Wilson and Lawrence have very few modern successors. People's expectations of 'fine writing' are now conditioned almost entirely by novels -- not by essays, or journalism, or history, or biography, which are expected to be more straightforwardly utilitarian. It's an interesting (and, to me, slightly depressing) cultural change. On preview: misteraitch, that's a great passage from Hydrotaphia, but I think there's an even better one: The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it .. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?

By: verstegan

verstegan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:58:15 -0800

Sorry, I meant, of course, '.. overwhelmingly taken from works of FICTION'.

By: JaredSeth

JaredSeth — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:00:01 -0800

All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors. At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence. Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede — sometimes attaining a length of six feet — found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters. Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams. William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch

By: outlier

outlier — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:00:41 -0800

"What is your purpose, then?" Hardesty asked. Because Jackson Mead thought he saw in Hardesty's face that Hardesty wanted, above all, to understand, he confided in him. "My purpose," he said, suddenly soft and benevolent, "is to tag this world with wider and wider rainbows, until the last is so perfect and eternal that it will catch the eye of the One who has abandoned us, and bring Him to right all the broken symmetries and make life once again a still and timeless dream. My purpose, Mr. Marratta, is to stop time, to bring back the dead. My purpose, in one word, is justice. Mark Helprin, Winters Tale

By: fire&wings

fire&wings — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:10:39 -0800

I'm gonna have to go with zoinks.

By: misteraitch

misteraitch — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:31:33 -0800

verstegan—the thing with Hydriotaphia is that it’s full of wonderfully resonant passages. For me, it was a toss up between the one I quoted, and the penultimate paragraph: Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity… I am with you in feeling sorry about the apparent devaluation of non-fiction in English.

By: Brandon Blatcher

Brandon Blatcher — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:11:12 -0800

"A stick sharpened at both ends." --Lord of the Flies

By: Huw

Huw — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:15:30 -0800

Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking. p125. As it somehow always manages to be before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing. p. 524 Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:26:17 -0800

[expletive deleted] writes "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." You mean Bill and Hillary, right?

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:33:44 -0800

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them. Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope the a fish wil rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters. Norman MacLean, A River Runs through It

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:34:39 -0800

Norman Maclean (and he makes a point about the spelling of the name in the novella).

By: rhymer

rhymer — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:37:11 -0800

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." The rather nicely understated opening sentence from JG Ballard's High Rise.

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:45:25 -0800

Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners. There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody's setting up late and talking. -- Yes, it's clearing up. There are the stars -- doing their old, old crisscross in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk -- or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. Hm-- Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners. -- You get a good rest, too. Good night.

(The concluding lines to the play "Our Town", by Thornton Wilder.)

By: runincircles

runincircles — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:00:56 -0800

There is a moment in every dawn when light floats. There is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. The moment passed, as it regularly did on Squornshalous Zeta, without incident. I think this really does represent some of the best things about Douglas Adams' prose - first, a situation that you instantly empathise with, in a "wow, someone else spotted/defined that" way. Beautifully described. Then (after a ridiculous name used completely deadpan) the feeling is completely deflated and the perspective is turned on its head. Genuis. brilliant question, lots of gorgeous examples

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:05:29 -0800

Not quite the essence of the novel (which seems to be about (Anglo-)Catholicism or God or something equally disreputable), but a passage nonetheless essential:

Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day -- had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? -- as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

(from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisted: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.) From the same work, Ryder's (and Waugh's) grimly funny vision of a future shaped by and for the common man:

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting "Hooper" and seeing if they still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: "Hooper Rallies," "Hooper Hostels," "International Hooper Co-operation" and "the Religion of Hooper." He was the acid test of all these alloys.

By: Patapsco Mike

Patapsco Mike — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:08:37 -0800

"When I recall my youth and jollity, it fairly warms the cockles of my heart! This very day I feel a pleasure start, yes, I can feel it tickling at the root. Lord, how it does me good! I've had my fruit, I've had my world and time, I've had my fling." The Wife of Bath's Prologue from The Canterbury Tales "What matter if a man lives seven years or seventy? His years are not an eyeblink to eternity, and de'il the way he spends 'em -- whether steering ships or scribbling verse, or building towns or burning 'em -- he dies like a Ma fly when his day is done, and the stars go round their courses just the same. Where's the profit and loss o' his labors? He'd as well have stayed abed, or sat his bum on a bench and watch the blind wights curse and labor over naught." John Barth- The Sot Weed Factor /yes, I know...

By: bluejayk

bluejayk — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:09:05 -0800

This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a godamn spy. Zooey - J.D. Salinger I remember reading that when I was about 19, and I liked all the fancy prose and New York-ish lifestyle stuff. Then I got to that sentence and I stopped, put down the book and let my mind reel. That's it, that's what's wrong with the world! I still love that line, although Salinger doesn't resonate with a 30 year old quite the way it does with a teenager.

By: pxe2000

pxe2000 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:16:51 -0800

Two from The Master and Margarita:

"Follow me, reader! Who ever told you there is no such thing int he world as real, true, everlasting love? May the liar have his despicable tongue cut out!

and

It's time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk."

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:20:26 -0800

The rocket's metal cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family. The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the centre of a vacuum. His wife, before him, trembled. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes. The children looked up at him. His face was cold. “What's wrong?” asked his wife. “Let's get back on the rocket.” “Go back to Earth?” “Yes! Listen!” The wind blew, whining. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. He saw the old cities, lost and lying like children's delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass. “Chin up, Harry,” said his wife. “It's too late. We've come at least sixty-five million miles or more.” The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass. He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. “Here we go,” he said — a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned. They walked into town. Ray Bradbury, Dark They Were and Golden Eyed

By: From Bklyn

From Bklyn — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:30:34 -0800

To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming.

By: lampoil

lampoil — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:42:32 -0800

Yeah, the books I put back on the shelf with post-its sticking out the tops so I can find my favorite parts again. Few and far between (thank goodness because those post-its look tacky). The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien:

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Junie B. Jones and the Mushy Gushy Valentime by Barbara Park:

"You are not the boss of my words, Grace," I said. "This is a freed country. And if I want to say valentime, I can. And I will not even go to jail."

If plays count, which I'm saying they do, Angels in America by Tony Kushner:

HARPER: So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing? PRIOR: The limitations of the imagination? HARPER: Yes. PRIOR: It's something you learn after your second theme party: It's All Been Done Before. HARPER: The world. Finite. Terribly, terribly. . . . Well . . . This is the most depressing hallucination I've ever had.

And finally, middle grade author Gary Schmidt has a new book called Trouble coming out next month. There's this scene in a chowder house in Portland, Maine, that rang so true to me that I immediately turned back and read it again before reading on. I don't have my copy, which is just as well because it would be too long to excerpt here.

By: shakespeherian

shakespeherian — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:48:48 -0800

If I were to pick a passage from Slaughterhouse-five it would be this one: He turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

By: newmoistness

newmoistness — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:55:22 -0800

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged, silently, doubly dark, from obscurity via a passageway from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden? The heaventree of stars, hung with humid nightblue fruit. -- James Joyce, Ulysses

By: jonmc

jonmc — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:56:23 -0800

"So there we were. Me, I was doing my usual hundred and fifty sit-ups. My feet were jammed under the couch for leverage and I was holding a five-pound barbell behind my head like an iron halo. La Donna was in her black Danskins sitting by the wall doing dancercizes. I had a stomach that looked like six miniature cobblestones. LaDonna was so limber that standing without bending her knees, she could work her head down between her legs and kiss her own ass. How very nice for the both of us. She was a twenty-eight-year-old bank clerk and would-be singer; I was a thirty-year-old door-to-door salesman and we both walked around all day like Back to Bataan. When I was doing my sit-ups I liked to watch TV-Lucy or Fonzie, whatever reruns I could get a hold of. That was not allowed when LaDonna was around. She needed silence to stand there, pull one foot backward, up over her shoulder and tap the base of her skull with her heel. I could have worked out when she wasn't around, but six weeks before, on a Sunday morning adter she finished her dancercizes, she came over to where I was and just sat on it. There are aborigines in New Guinea who have been squatting by an airstrip since 19433 because a plane once landed and dropped off food. Sic weeks ain't that long. Meanwhile, if I needed extra money I could do exhibitions, have two-ton semis drive over my stomach at state fairs." - Richard Price Ladies Man

By: fourcheesemac

fourcheesemac — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:58:46 -0800

"And God was angry." The holy bible.

By: nasreddin

nasreddin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:05:18 -0800

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious patch of wall. "That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. "All the same," he said to himself, "I shouldn't like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers." He repeated to himself: "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: "It's nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked." A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by the artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there - those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only - if then! - to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable. They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

By: wsg

wsg — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:05:54 -0800

"It's the law in most states, at least in mine, that it must rain on all long holiday weekends, else how would multitudes become drenched and miserable." John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

By: Toekneesan

Toekneesan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:22:09 -0800

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ” —Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mister Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine

By: nasreddin

nasreddin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:22:34 -0800

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. 'Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.' And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.'

- James Boswell, Life of Johnson and - Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

By: BeerFilter

BeerFilter — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:30:47 -0800

My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls, 1924

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:31:02 -0800

"Ain't you going to even send a nigger? " he cried. "At least you sent a nigger before!"

(From William Faulkner's "Barn Burning".)

By: milarepa

milarepa — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:36:17 -0800

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and the woman with ashes on her breath. -James Joyce, Ulysses

By: Greg Nog

Greg Nog — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:38:27 -0800

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him –- without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did -- and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track down and stamp out -- tyrrany, despotism, he called it -- making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak.

From Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

By: mygothlaundry

mygothlaundry — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:38:37 -0800

I did not think about the future. In spite of what the doctor at the clinic had said I felt certain that the cure would fail. The pattern of destiny seemed clear: down and down, and down. But then the mysteries began. John Fowles, The Magus There's a quote in there too, that I can't find right now, about teaching and how a really terrible teacher, a monster or freak, is better than a mediocre teacher, because a child can learn from all extremities of humankind. It's brilliant and it always springs to mind but, alas, I'm not finding it right now.

By: grumblebee

grumblebee — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:50:03 -0800

Never, never, never, never, never. -- Shakespeare, "King Lear" The destruction of words is a beautiful thing. -- Orwell, "1984"

By: shakespeherian

shakespeherian — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:52:49 -0800

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. -- Nabokov, Lolita

By: mecran01

mecran01 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:56:55 -0800

I tried to show my ability to harness language once, and it bit me viciously on my shoulder then crapped on my new shoes.

By: AJaffe

AJaffe — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:06:21 -0800

"There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

By: the luke parker fiasco

the luke parker fiasco — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:43:04 -0800

From the point of view of admittedly privileged white male technocrats such as Randy Waterhouse and his ancestors, the Palouse was like one big live-in laboratory for nonlinear aerodynamics and chaos theory. Not much was alive there, and so one's observations were not forever being clouded by trees, flowers, fauna, and the ploddingly linear and rational endeavors of humans. The Cascades blocked any of those warm, moist, refreshing Pacific breezes, harvesting their moisture to carpet ski areas for dewy-skinned Seattleites, and diverted what remained north to Vancouver or south to Portland. Consequently the Palouse had to get its air shipped down in bulk from the Yukon and British Columbia. It flowed across the blasted volcanic scab land of central Washington in (Randy supposed) a more or less continuous laminar sheet that, when it hit the rolling Palouse country, ramified into a vast system of floods, rivers and rivulets diverging around the bald swelling hills and recombining in the sere declivities. But it never recombined exactly the way it was before. The hills had thrown entropy into the system. Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this could be kneaded from place to place but never removed. The entropy manifested itself as swirls and violent gusts and ephemeral vortices. All of these things were clearly visible, because all summer the air was full of dust or smoke, and all winter it was full of windblown snow. --Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (chosen more or less at random from handfuls of passages that read like this) The opening line to Neuromancer is incredibly evocative, but I've also long been a fan of this one: Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks. Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol. --William Gibson, Neuromancer

By: beagle

beagle — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:54:29 -0800

This, from Chapte 29 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up - flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.

By: nonmerci

nonmerci — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:57:40 -0800

from Lolita: "We all have such fateful objects--it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another--carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:59:16 -0800

I got out of a year of college English by writing an AP exam essay on this passage in Wuthering Heights:

I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway...

Like father, like son, and all that.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:00:26 -0800

"Then come and let's have a bit of dinner." "Why do you ask me?" "Not out of charity," I answered coolly. "I don't really care a twopenny damn if you starve or not." His eyes lit up again. "Come on, then," he said getting up. "I'd like a decent meal." — The Moon and Sixpence

By: generalist

generalist — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:05:49 -0800

She larft then she said, 'Riddley there aint nothing what aint a tel for you. The wind in the nite the dus on the road even the leases stone you kick a long in front of you. Even the shadder of that leases stoan roaling on or stanning stil its all telling.' Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:13:32 -0800

I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me. The Wasp Factory -- Iain Banks

By: Man-Thing

Man-Thing — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:18:03 -0800

Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

By: m0nm0n

m0nm0n — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:34:23 -0800

The Magus is great. I need to re-read it. As I am in another country without my books handy, I must trust Wikiquote for this (spoken by The Judge - sorry if it's a bit longish): If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

By: Alvy Ampersand

Alvy Ampersand — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:55:55 -0800

The truck went on down the road and when the sound of it finally faded away, he walked close with the little gun out in front of him and pushed the safety off with his thumb. It made a tiny click and Russell closed his eyes and covered those eyes with his hands. Waiting. Joe started to tell him a few things first, then decided there was no need of that.

By: the luke parker fiasco

the luke parker fiasco — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:01:21 -0800

m0nm0n, you reminded me of this one, so evocative it's breath-stopping: Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augured the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones might cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? --Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

By: gaspode

gaspode — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:01:42 -0800

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on... far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:02:34 -0800

Amazed this hasn't been mentioned yet (and I would've mentioned it anyway): The ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. - Jack Kerouac, On The Road

By: A-Train

A-Train — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:07:00 -0800

Expletive Deleted: I was thinking of the closing passage to The Great Gatsby, too. Saves me the trouble of looking it up. orthogonality: Brideshead Revisted has a subtitle? I never knew that.

By: krakedhalo

krakedhalo — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:12:38 -0800

Only one Rushdie line so far? Here's my favorite, which could sum up all of his writing: The town looked like a picture postcard torn up by an angry child and then painstakingly reassembled by its mother. It had acquired the quality of brokenness, had become kin to the great family of the broken: broken plates, broken dolls, broken English, broken promises, broken hearts. --The Ground Beneath Her Feet

By: Patapsco Mike

Patapsco Mike — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:23:55 -0800

By: you're a kitty!

you're a kitty! — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:33:32 -0800

Let us hope that we are preceded in this world by a love story. --Of Time and Memory And in the nonfiction realm, I think this passage sums up the style and genius of Bill Bryson: It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But - and here's an interesting point - for the most part it doesn't want to be much. ----A Short History of Nearly Everything

By: toastedbeagle

toastedbeagle — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:41:59 -0800

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." -The Velveteen Rabbit

By: gudrun

gudrun — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:52:27 -0800

"Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things." - from The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura

By: dances_with_sneetches

dances_with_sneetches — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:06:49 -0800

Malcolm Lowry, Under The Volcano. My vote for the most beautiful long sentence ever written. It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o'clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engined train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing of the wind veers for the moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg's angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded, lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightning, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of beach, its growing thunder and commotion now joined to the diminshing thunder of the train, and now breaking reboant on our beach, while the floats, for there are timber diving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightning within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing-boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightning in the blue evening. . . unearthly.

By: granted

granted — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:19:28 -0800

"A person to whom everything can be said - am I an idiot to want such a thing? But ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified...it's the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences. By scraps and bits I've in the past surrendered myself to strangers--men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would've made the one person in the world--but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets." -Truman Capote, The Grass Harp

By: vsync

vsync — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:47:40 -0800

It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:48:41 -0800

I'm more than a little surprised that these bits, so meaningful to each of us that took a moment to add them, lose so much out of context. It's a bit like trying to choose one feather from a beautiful bird which will allow everyone to see the bird. It fails. I disagree, but I also think this exercise works much better for nonfiction than for fiction, as in the original example. It is hard (but interesting) to try to encapsulate a work of fiction, especially something rich and complex, in a single passage. But nonfiction books often provide a better opportunity, especially when the writer has the ability to wax poetic about a topic while still sticking to their thesis. Witness Pater's famous passage on the Mona Lisa:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.

Yeats turned it into poetry for a reason.

By: -harlequin-

-harlequin- — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:52:04 -0800

From "The Guns of Avalon" (Roger Zelazny) "Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot du Loc to the keep of Ganelorn, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all." Quoted from memory, so might not be verbatim. The story is about a bunch of princes and princesses who are all fighting and intriguing against each other in order to claim the throne or various other pettyness, but when the fit hits the shan, they have to grow up and stop acting like spoiled brats. Among other things.

By: steef

steef — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:00:47 -0800

I was always partial to Van Helsing's throwaway at the end of Dracula: We want no proofs. We ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care. Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.

By: pracowity

pracowity — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:03:41 -0800

The New We Work and Play:

Look, Father. Dick is big. Sally is little. Big, big Dick. Little Baby Sally.

By: skyper

skyper — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:05:27 -0800

“I was also sad because I knew I’d had a Perfect Moment and I would now have to go home.” – Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia.

So many authors recognized on this thread have also given me “perfect moments” in literature.
Nice to see Amy Hempel as well as the words from Brideshead Revisited quoted here!

But bookhouse, did you have to choose the very ending of her most tragic story?

By: [expletive deleted]

[expletive deleted] — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:47:00 -0800

I copied this out of my profile page, and I know this isn't really literature in the strictest sense, and this line isn't so much beautiful as it is an ageless distillation of a fundamental truth:

For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences- either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. -Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War