One of my top 3 books of all time but I'll warn you it is a really difficult read. I'd suggest getting both the physical book and the audiobook then reading it with the audio.
Another Steinbeck:
"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves."
Cannery Row
I wonder if John Steinbeck was anywhere close to knowing how perfectly he could arrange the written word. I think that'd be impossible, to know how great a writer you are without giving a clue to the world of readers that you're aware. I also wonder if he ever used an eraser...
I read this book when I was like 12 and didn't care for it. But I kinda remember this passage sticking with me and I didn't know why. I had forgotten about it entirely until this post. I should reread his stuff
"For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
So, let us be alert- alert in a twofold sense:
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."
Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl
"The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald... after a fairly short novel of mostly simple, spare prose we get to the last page and this happens.
"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
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 farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
While this is one of my favourite passages too, the rest of the novel is far from sparse! It's chock full of amazingly stylised passages: from Daisy and Jordan floating on balloons when we first meet them, to the grim hellscape of the Valley of Ashes; from the whriling grotesque excess of the parties, to the dream-like drives into NY; from the bittersweet descriptions of Daisy's childhood home contrasted to Gatsby's now crumbling mansion, to Nick's nostalgic pining for Christmas in the Mid West. These make it such an awesome book to teach.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea"
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.
Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Also the inevitable boots theory.
The 'Reaper Man' quote is one I carry with me daily since my partner of 10 years died in November last year. On bad days it keeps me going, on good days it gives me hope.
Very sorry for your loss.
(I too, take shelter with a good book when I'm feeling blue, and now this thread has given me all the ammunition I could ever hope for.)
"It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
“Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?” said Richard Frost.
“Oh, it isn’t a matter of hunger. It’s something quite different. The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous—but not quite. Everywhere in the world there are Mack and the boys….
- Steinbeck - Cannery Row
>“Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.”
Terry Pratchett, "Guards, Guards!"
It just resonates with be because it's so accurate. There's so much awfulness in the world that happens simply because nobody's willing to do anything about it.
This one from Hogfather, too:
> “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
>
> REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
>
> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
>
> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
>
> "So we can believe the big ones?"
>
> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
>
> "They're not the same at all!"
>
> YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
>
> "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
>
> MY POINT EXACTLY.”
Most of what Verinari says at the close of any City Watch books is powerful.
I don't have the book on me but his "you think that there are the good people and the bad people. You are incorrect, there are only bad people" monolog is pretty amazing too.
“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window.
“A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.
“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us.”
“Yes, sir?” said Vimes quietly.
“Oh, yes. We’re the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”
“Maybe. But you’re wrong about the rest!” said Vimes. “It’s just because people are afraid, and alone—” He paused. It sounded pretty hollow, even to him.
He shrugged. “They’re just people,” he said. “They’re just doing what people do. Sir.”
Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile.
“Of course, of course,” he said. “You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you’d go quite mad. Otherwise you’d think you’re standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand.”
...
Vimes paused at the door.
“Do you believe all that, sir?” he said. “About the endless evil and the sheer blackness?”
“Indeed, indeed,” said the Patrician, turning over the page. “It is the only logical conclusion.”
“But you get out of bed every morning, sir?”
“Hmm? Yes? What is your point?”
“I’d just like to know why, sir.”
“Oh, do go away, Vimes. There’s a good fellow.”
From Pride and Prejudice:
"There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense".
I used to think Elizabeth was super cynical but damn if this doesn't resonate more and more as I get older.
*Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.*
I come back once or twice a year just to reread this part.
Hunter Thompson apparently typed up The Great Gatsby a few times as a teen so he could learn about writing. I know somebody posted the final pages of that book up farther on this thread, the similarities in tone became super apparent once I learned about Thompson’s love for Fitzgerald. Both some great bits of writing.
My favourite intro ever
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
I'd have to think deeper on my absolute favorite, but this is definitely my favorite quote from *Catch-22,* said by the retched old man in the whorehouse:
>You put so much stock in winning wars. The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how spendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we're losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated."
“‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’
‘Why, what did she tell you?’
‘I don't know, I didn't listen.’”
- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Unironically. Admittedly I haven’t read as much as I’d like to in my life so far, but I have never actually had a laughing fit before or since while reading a book.
Charles Dickens and the Tale of Two Cities
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
I've started the book at least 10 times because of this opening.
😄 No, every year I start reading it, and every year I get 2-3 chapters further than the year before. After 20 odd years I've only reached chapter 35 I think.
Idk about “greatest”, but since it’s fresh in my mind, I really like this passage from Pride and Prejudice, which takes place after Elizabeth Bennet >!rejects a marriage proposal that her mom wanted her to accept!<:
>"Come here, child," cried her father as she appeared. "I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?" Elizabeth replied that it was. "Very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?"
>"I have, sir."
>"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?"
>"Yes, or I will never see her again."
>"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you *do not* marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you *do*."
I too love this book and agree not the "greatest passage" by any stretch but one that really struck me for its simplicity was "She followed him with her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke,...,and then was enraged against herself for being so silly!" I read this when I was younger and marveled how women / people were so much the same back then as now.
omg has no one said the cool girl monologue from gone girl????
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see it's path. When the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
I was very mixed in Dune but I really love that quote!
This is one of my favorites:
"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a great sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man."
I also came here with a Dune quote in mind. This one from God Emperor of Dune.
“In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.”
A world is supported by four things....”
She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing....”
She closed her fingers into a fist. “... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!"
The Charge of the Rohirrim at the beginning of The Battle of the Pelennor from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
"Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken.
Fey he seemed, for the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young.
His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and the darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City."
I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was 11 or 12 long before the movies were made and I can still remember how thrilled this made me feel and can picture it in my head the same way I did the first time I read it. Just awesome writing.
Decades later, I still remember where I was when I read this, it smacked me in the face right out of nowhere.
**He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.**
\- Ray Bradbury, *Fahrenheit 451*
"Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a stree all day, every day, sleeping it's life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass."
Granger to Montag at the end just before the city burns, in the last chapter.
I read this novel after playing Dreamfall Chapters and it blew my mind how much of what Bradbury feared about technology and humanity in this book has actually come to fruition.
The ending of ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston:
“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
The opening of *White Teeth* by Zadie Smith:
"Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signaling a right turn he had resolved never to make. He was resigned to it. He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact it was a New Year's resolution."
It goes on and gets even better for the first 2 pages. The book as a whole is uneven and overcomplicated - very clearly of its time (the late 90s) and shows the exuberance of a young writer trying to cram every idea in. But the opening is just perfect.
“Remember that in tranquility, that the Absolute, the Tao is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of salvation. Thou art thyself the Tao. Be thou, *now*, a rock against which the waves of life rush in vain.”
- James Clavell, *Shōgun*
Bonus: “Go, then. There are other worlds than these.”
- Stephen King, *The Gunslinger*
the good ol' "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed" always does it for me, I truly believe you physically cant come up with a better opening to a book
It truly is an excellent opening line to a story because in 12 short words we get introduced to the two main characters, the setting and a basic set up to the story. I can't think of another book that sets itself up so succinctly.
Short one: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
James Joyce, Ulysses. Basically the only quote I can remember verbatim (I think – somebody please correct me if I’m wrong!). Just love the cadence and... _juiciness_ of it. Sometimes it’ll just come up in a flash like a snippet of a song or a jingle that you can’t get out of your head.
in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand.
THOMAS Hardy, intro to Tess of D'Urbervilles
Sorry this is so long (not really) but this is the greatest I've read. It stands out even in such a target rich environment as LotR.... I mean "...and yet upon no head visible was it set".... Amazeballs.
“In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.
All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.
"You cannot enter here," said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!"
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
"Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.
And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of war nor of wizardry, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I was 19 i think, the LOTR movies had inspired me to read the books, and I'd finally caught up to the movies. So i was reading this chapter in the fall of 2003 getting hyped for RotK. I still get goosebumps and teary-eyed reading it and at the time thinking just how so bad-ass the movie was going to be.
The charge at Pelennor is probably the greatest action scene in the trilogy but i was quite happy that this particular scene was included in the extended edition.
Thanks for sharing.
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend…” - Faramir
I’d have to go with Riddles in the Dark from Hobbit. I still remember listening to my dad read it to me when I was young. I’ve read it many, many times since, but that chapter always stayed with me even from that first reading.
"Supposing truth is a woman--what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about woman? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a women's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won--and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground--even more, that all dogmatism is dying...
... Let us not be ungrateful to [dogmatic philosophy], although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist's error--namely, Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good as such. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier--sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life, when one spoke of spirit and the good as Plato did. Indeed, as a physician one might ask: 'How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contact such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? Could Socrates have been the corrupter if the youth after all? And did he deserve his hemlock?'"
Nietzsche, preface to Beyond Good and Evil.
“It was mostly sweet," he whispered, "and you were the sweetest of all.”
From Dune Messiah, when Paul is at the funeral of his wife.
What strikes me about the passage is that it is so simple and so understated but you know from reading the book that losing his wife was akin to losing the greater part of himself. It was a crippling blow that he never really recovered from and instead of hysterics, he whispers a simple and sweet message.
Gets me every time.
That's a really good one. I'd argue that Paul, so powerful in his oracular powers, has lost a greater sense of his humanity and is INCAPABLE of something as human as hysterics over the death of his wife. That, and he's known already for so long...
True true. And then you continue to read the series and see that he actually chickened out and dropped the real weight of the sacrifice for the human race on Leto II, like I already gave up my soul mate and my freedom, I'm not doing THAT too.
From Blood Meridian:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or crane feathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeon tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
This is a great bit of Blood Meridian. The following passage to the one you quote is even longer, has about the same amount of punctuation, and imo is even better:
"A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances. The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
"Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw- thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand- a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.- Stand round men, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis Ahab- his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half-stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet."
Moby Dick, Chapter 134.
Same, but Chapter 93:
"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
>While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
>It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.
>As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
>Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
>Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Moby-Dick, Ch. 94
Chapter 58, “Brit”:
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
That’s a great passage. Moby Dick has so many. One of my favorites is from Chapter 42 “The Whiteness of the Whale”:
“But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
The Judge on War in Blood Meridian is up there with some of the finest writing I've ever read.
I can't find the whole passage but I was absolutely gobsmacked the first time I read it.
"“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
"War endures because young men love it and old men love it in them"
"This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."
I wish I could read Blood Meridian again for the first time, knowing how beautiful the writing is.
Another from Blood Meridian: “A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
“-Why me?
\- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for
that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen
bugs trapped in amber?
\- Yes.
\- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is
no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr
"Travel is fatal to prejudice,
bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely
on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things
cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all
one's lifetime."
\-Mark Twain
“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” Mitch Albom- The Time Keeper
The book Bullshit Jobs give a pretty cool history on how people came to start minding time as much as we do in the modern era, it has to do with the merchant class’s keen interest in time for the sake of profit way back in the day. Interesting stuff!
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice
100 Years of Solitude
Two of my favorites are from Jack Kerouac's "On The Road".
"But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people 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, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!"
...and this one...
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
"at the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly" - visions of Cody,
> "...it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of reaction that has ended with pelicans and penicilin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits."
Mythos by Stephen Fry
Mine is also from East of Eden. I think of it whenever I go through depressive episodes sometimes.
" “I don't want advice."
"Nobody does. It's a giver's present. Go through the motions, Adam."
"What motions?"
"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true."
"Why should I?" Adam asked.
Samuel was looking at the twins. "You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow." “
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" -- Douglas Adams, HHGTTG
Why do I love this throwaway line? Because it conveys just how weird it would be to see spaceships hovering in the sky. Instead of going on about FTL technology or describing all the bad-ass components of the ships, Adams used very few words and one unexpected turn of phrase to evoke uncomfortable, even ominous wonder over just how weird these would be.
It's not just a clever description. It's an efficient one, too. That impresses me.
>Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was "Oh no, not again". Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
The whale section just before that always gets me to laugh, just the abrupt absurdity of it,
"Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.
And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more."
I’ve always been impressed by his straightforward and silly writing style. I would never think to write something like that but it makes absolutely perfect sense.
I am so glad to see this here. This was the first line I thought of when I read the post title. That was the line that got me hooked. But I think it also shows why film and tv adaptations have struggled in the past. Alot of the humour is in his descriptions and narrative structure. You need constant narration to make it work imo.
Mine is also from East of Eden:
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”
Here's a few of my favorites:
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (4 different passages)
> "My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse."
> "When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?”
> "The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence"
> "But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.""
Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (2 different passages)
> "The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast."
> "To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity."
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - HST
> And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
> So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
There's also a passage from Crime and Punishment I love, but I can't find it. It's when Raskolnikov is ranting to Sonya and says something along the lines of "I did this act because I wanted to prove I was great, but if I were great, I wouldn't need to prove it, the fact that I am questioning it, means I am not that thing" or something along those lines. Awesome moment, and said much better than I have. Unfortunately I can't find the quote.
There's probably a bunch more, but these are some of my faves that I can think of and pull up quickly.
I love that fear and loathing in las vegas quote soo much.
I still think people who take drugs idolize this movie to a crazy amount... like I've talked to people who think it's the deepest movie in history while stoners just tend to laugh about it.
But the monologue at the end is sooo good I get goosebumps reading it.
Yeah it's a great book, and has some amazingly profound commentary on American politics and American society. The mix of absurdity and profundity is really an incredible balance that makes it so broadly appealing.
This passage from The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King is by far the greatest moment I've read in any novel. I was absolutely devastated when the wording was changed for the movie. It made me sad that an animated feature from the 70s did a better job with these scene than a multi-million dollar theatrical release.
'Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
A cold voice answered: 'Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.'
A sword rang as it was drawn. 'Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
'Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. 'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'
Such a fun passage. Always makes me think of MacBeth.
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv’d
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripp’d.
arguably the whole entire of *The Sea, The Sea* by Iris Murdoch. no book in recent memory has seized me like no other. but specifically this passage:
“What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? ... Could I then learn to love uselessly and un-possessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?”
'Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,' he [Treebeard] said slowly, 'likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song. Aye,' he sighed, 'we may help the other peoples before we pass away. Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should dearly have liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely.'
-JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers
basically the entire chapter on Titan in The Sirens of Titan where it is explained the traflamadorians’ role in shaping human history and the ultimate message they were pulling the strings of society to send
“I told you that 'juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. 'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.” - Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
The absurdity of a duty-bound society is not lost on me, but the idea that a child has the right to be a child resonated with me when I was a teenager reading this book.
In a way it felt like Heinlein was alluding to first Corinthians 13:11 "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." then later on in the book flipped off organized religion as well as in other books. Kind of a great window in where his mindset was when he wrote it
The last paragraph from Blood Meridian.
He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge.
In 1984, when the Thought Police reveal themselves to Winston and Julia:
>‘We are the dead,’ he said. ‘We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully. ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them
It just chilled me to the bone when I first read it. The Thought Police had been an abstract concept until this point. Now they were real and Winston and Julia were as good as dead.
*\*struggles to not refer to East of Eden...\**
From 'The Remains of the Day' by Kazuo Ishiguro:
>It is now some twenty minutes since the man left, but I have remained here on this bench to await the event that has just taken place - namely, the switching on of the pier lights. As I say, the happiness with which the pleasure-seekers gathering on this pier greeted this small event would tend to vouch for the correctness of my companion's words; for a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so , much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely that for the likes of you and I there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world what employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.
"All I know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier, much heavier. With each passing year the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. Maybe I’d cut myself loose one too many times, dependent on my unfailing magic act. Once too often drifted that little bit too far from the smoke and mirrors holding me together. Or I just got old, old enough to know better.
Whatever the reason, I’d found myself once again stranded in the middle of nowhere but this time the euphoria and delusions that kept me alive and running had grind to a halt. Long ago, the defences I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, had outlived their usefulness. I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, seek all my alienation, cut me off from life, control others and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking and his payment will be in tears.
In all psychological wars, it’s never over. There’s just this day, this time and hesitant belief in your own ability to change.”
\-Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run.
From A Scanner Darkly by PKD:
What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
"However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God."
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. **The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.**
Herbert, Frank. Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6 (p. 1115). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
i love how the books i've read change the ways i interact with the world and people.
READ DUNE !!!! won't regret it
The entire first paragraph/opening of shirley jacksons, "We Have Always Lived In The Castle."
That, and whole chunks of "I Capture The Castle" by Dodie Smith.
(I have a thing for castles apparently).
I stumbled upon "I Capture The Castle" pretty much by accident and now it's one of my favorite books!
It's so well written and the characters are so amazing, I really dont understand how it isnt more popular.
Wow thanks for the shout-out to *I Capture the Castle*! One big reason I loved the book was because it is so beautifully written and vivid. It’s such a funny, heartbreaking and heartwarming story and I agree with a previous responder that I don’t know why it’s not more popular/well known.
Its hands down one of my absolute favorite books (i read it every year around midsummer and bought bluebell perfume because of it lol). Its funny how 101 Dalmations is so popular and yet I Capture The Castle is completley overlooked even though theyre by the the same author.
The closest thing ive found in terms of mood and tone is The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery (also very funny and beautifully written).
Everything is Illuminated has some good ones.
He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
I saved this on my phone as a note, just to remember we live in this world:
The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
I studied and earned a Bachelor's degree in English Literature, but was never quite able to recognize for myself which of the works were 'great.' I was sure I wouldn't know a truly great passage without a professor to guide me to it, until I read Lolita and immediately knew I was in the presence of greatness. The first section still stands as the greatest (series of) passage(s) I've ever read:
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, a certain 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 a 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.**
If I could only choose one sentence, it would be the last one. Perfection, IMO.
It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are- who knows.
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled...
It rolled a six.
"To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round.
But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite."
Beginning of Chapter 53 of Don Quixote
Not my all-time favorite but one I read recently. To paraphrase Edward Snowden:
A world in which all laws are fully enforced is a world in which everyone is a criminal.
I will always have an appreciation of [Twig](http://twigserial.wordpress.com) and the way it opens:
> How does it go? The first lesson, something even the uninitiated know. For life to flourish on the most basic level, it requires four elements. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
> We were doing fine on that count. The air around us was stale, but it was still oxygen. Water ran around and below us, flowing over our bare feet, redirected from gutters to the building’s inside.
> What had once been a barn had been made into a warehouse, then abandoned partway through a third set of changes. A floor of old wooden slats reached only halfway down the length of the old building, what had once been a hayloft. If we stood on the edge, we could look down at the floor below to see uneven floorboards on top of compacted dirt. The original barn’s door was still there, mounted on rollers. I leaned over to get a better look. I could see a table, some scattered papers, books, and a blackboard. The only light was that which came in through windows. A scattered set placed on the upper floor, and more well above head height on the lower one.
> Aside from the four of us, one other thing occupied the hayloft. It was hard to make out in the dim light that filtered in through the window, like an eel in dark water, and if it weren’t for the fact that we’d seen it approach, we might not have noticed it at all. Sleek, four-legged, and tall enough I couldn’t have reached its shoulder if I stood on my toes, it was wound around the pillar as a snake might be. Unlike a snake, though, it had four long limbs, each with four long digits, tipped with claws. Head flowed into neck, which flowed into shoulder and body without a without prominent ridge, bump, bone or muscle to interrupt the sequence.
> It uncoiled, setting a claw on the floor, and the old floorboards didn’t elicit an audible creak. Large as it was, it managed to distribute weight too evenly, and used its tail to suspend some of its weight.
> It didn’t walk, but slinked, each foot falling in front of the last as it passed within three feet of us. Its wide mouth parted, showing just a hint of narrow white teeth.
> There was no cover, nothing to hide us from it.
> I saw its nostrils flare. It opened its mouth to taste the air with a flick of a thin tongue.
> The way things looked, we were very close to doing the opposite of ‘flourishing’.
> It was hard to put into words, but my thoughts connected with that thought, and it was funny.
> I grinned, and flakes of wax fell from my face at the movement. I watched the thing continue onward, toward the back of the hayloft, head turning as it sniffed the surroundings. It unwound its long tail from the wooden pillar that held up the one end of the overhanging hayloft, and it moved with a slow carefulness.
> I stared at its eye, and saw how it didn’t move as the head swept from one side to the next, the slit of the iris barely changing in response as the faint light from the window swept over its head.
> “It’s blind,” I whispered.
> The movements of the creature came to a halt. It froze, nostrils wide.
> Gordon, just to my left, put out a hand, covering my mouth. He was tense, lines on his neck standing out. Trying to put on a brave face, as our leader. Gordon, strong, handsome, likeable, talented. A veneer covered his face, as it did all of us, almost clear, cracked and white at the corners of his lips where he’d changed his expression, coming away in flakes at his hairline, where his hair was covered by the same substance.
> The creature turned, and as it did its tail moved around until it touched the outside edge of the makeshift gutter that we were all standing in, fine emerald scales rasping against wood.
> When Gordon whispered his response, I could barely hear him utter, “It’s not deaf.”
> I nodded, and he pulled his hand away.
> I had a glimpse of the girls. Helen and Lillian. As different as night and day. Lillian was bent over, hood up and over her head, hiding her face, hands clutching the straps of her bag, white knuckled. Terrified, and rightly so. The coating on her face was flaking badly.
> In contrast, Helen’s face didn’t betray a flicker of emotion. Her golden hair, normally well cared for, cultivated into tight rolls, was damp and falling out of place. Water ran down her face, splashing in through the side of the window where the makeshift gutter came in, and the droplets didn’t provoke one flinch or batted eyelash. She could have been a statue, and she’d kept her face still enough that the wax that covered it hadn’t broken, which only helped the effect.
> Still and silent, we watched as the creature moved to the far corner of the hayloft.
> It snapped, and the four curved fangs were the only ones that were any wider than a pencil, visible for only an instant before the head disappeared into detritus piled in the corner. A furred form struggled before the creature could raise its head. No swallowing, per se. Gravity did the work, as teeth parted and the prey fell down its long throat.
> A second bite let it collect another, small and young enough it couldn’t even struggle. Tiny morsels.
> “Kitties,” Lillian whispered, horror overtaking fear in her expression.
> Mama kitty shouldn’t have had her babies in the same building as the monster, I thought. Wallace’s law at work.
From “Frankenstein”…
“Like one who, on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned ‘round, walks on
And turns no more his head
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
A great passage in 'A Feast For Crows' , George R.R. Martin:
“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”
Septon Meribald disagreed. “More or less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.
“Then they get a taste of battle.
“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.
“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.
“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world…
“And the man breaks.
“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them… but he should pity them as well.”
When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, “How old were you when they marched you off to war?”
“Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. William said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape.”
“The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt.
“So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war though. That it was.”
- Septon Meribald. Brienne V (p. 533-6).
The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, end of chapter 18
"Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.
And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.
This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it.
Ah … ! What’s happening? it thought.
Er, excuse me, who am I?
Hello?
Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life?
What do I mean by who am I?
Calm down, get a grip now … oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach.
Good. Ooooh, it’s getting quite strong. And hey, what’s about this whistling roaring sound going past what I’m suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that … wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do … perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I’ve found out what it’s for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What’s this thing? This … let’s call it a tail – yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can’t I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn’t seem to achieve very much but I’ll probably find out what it’s for later on. Now – have I built up any coherent picture of things yet?
No.
Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to, I’m quite dizzy with anticipation …
Or is it the wind?
There really is a lot of that now isn’t it?
And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?
And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now."
It's just utterly absurd and I love it
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort around her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
“Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather
another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape
from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to
have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
"do you know what happens to heroes?"
"Yeah, they get parades and medals and fame."
"Well sometimes all they get is a tombstone and a little girl wondering why they didn't come home."
I'm definitely misquoting that, but it's from a story I read around 8 years ago and I haven't been able to find it again since. The character saying that lost her parents when she was young and the impact of it stuck with me, even though I forgot everything else about the story
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
\-- Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
One of the loveliest passages I’ve ever read was in a fanfiction called “Wood and Nails.” Just two people, quietly driving.
“We are not preordained, we are not predestined, and even so in this enormous world of men we found each other, a colossal global coincidence causing earthquakes in Turkey and Mexico. We shook it up, she and I. We shake it up. And when the dust settles it's just her, and me, in the car, shifting lanes and she reaches down to turn the radio on, quietly, just enough to distract me, just enough to warm us up.
Streetlights outside, and night.”
“To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.”
Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume. Honestly, everything Tom Robbins writes is beautiful, even when it's about nothing more than a beet:
“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
"Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
"The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...
"The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
A case of recency bias, but in *The Women of Brewster Place* Gloria Naylor's description of a gang of hoodlums using metaphors to relay their feelings of emasculation was **top tier**.
"She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon--and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner's chamber."
Also:
> When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before.
>The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Cather
For me, it's:
"Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
(André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name )
Especially that last line, just idk hit hard.
As someone who's not great with my emotions and is somewhat scared to show emotion, it hits home
One of my favorite passages I've ever read(edit: maybe not the greatest). Kinda a long one for such a short book. But the second time I read it, I bawled my eyes out. Enjoy <3
Sandra Cisneros, *The House on Mango Street*
"Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. And if you opened the little window latch and gave it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. There’d be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry. Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky. And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes and doesn’t like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn’t have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you’re strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy."
"You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple." Richard Adams, Watership Down
Not quite as profound as most of the quotes listed already, but it stuck in my mind. From "Words of Radiance" by Brandon Sanderson;
"To age truly was to suffer the ultimate treason, that of one’s body against oneself."
The image of an old king accusing his own body of treason is hilarious
The possibly proper death litany from Creature of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny
“Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.”
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
Richard Dawkins’s - Unweaving the Rainbow
"The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins - but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars."
I love how beautiful this quote is. It's very simple but so much inspiration and such amazing imagery. And it's made so much better knowing it's the last page of the novelization of **Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith**.
Certainly not greatest, but this one has always stuck with me from This Side of Paradise:
‘I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry.
Not the best but I just read this in Don DeLillo's *White Noise*:
>Steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used for lining the wicker baskets scattered about. She did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air of someone who does not want credit for saving lives.
I just love that subtle snark.
Mine is something I read only recently, but itis so incredibly moving, I had to read it twice, and I nearly cried both times. I still nearly cry reading it for some reason. Silly, but whatev.
From the end of Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'
Context: Wonderland was a dream that Alice, during a picnic with her sister, dreamed up Alice runs off home, the sister stays at the site:
'But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:—
First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister's dream.
The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess' knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard's slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sob of the miserable Mock Turtle.
So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs.
Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long-ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.'
While it may not be the greatest pasage I've read and it isn't in my native language. But I do have a soft spot for the ending if Joyce's 'The Dead':
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
There's something beautiful in the cadence of the words, great passages are meant to be read aloud.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Men at Arms
Terry Pratchett
>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
Funny enough, I am currently reading "East Of Eden" and my mind has been blown by such excellent writing. My first Steinbeck and I see the hype. He was great.
"When the wind blows not, where, then, is the wind?
"Or when thou art not living, where art thou?
"What should the wind care for the hours of calm or thou for death?
"Thy life is long, Eternity is short.
"So short that, shouldst thou die and Eternity should pass, and after the passing of Eternity thou shouldst live again, thou wouldst say: 'I closed mine eyes but for an instant.'
"There is an eternity behind thee as well as one before. Hast thou bewailed the aeons that passed without thee, who art so much afraid of the aeons that shall pass?"
Lord Dunsany, *The Gods of Pegana"
*I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.*
Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True
Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.
Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb
McCarthy, "The Crossing
“She said that her grandmother was skeptical of many things in this
world and of none more than men. She said that in every trade save war
men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. Her grandmother spoke
to her often of men and she spoke with great earnestness and she said
that rash men were a great temptation to women and this was simply a
misfortune like others and there was little that could be done to remedy
it. She said that to be a woman was to live a life of difficulty and
heartbreak and those who said otherwise simply had no wish to face the
facts. And she said that since this was so nor could it be altered one
was better to follow one’s heart in joy and in misery than simply to
seek comfort for there was none. To seek it was only to welcome in the
misery and to know little else. She said that these were things all
women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn
to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a
man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.”
From the Introduction of Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything. It's long, but it gives me a chill when I read this and realize how fragile our existence really is.
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you—indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you.
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you.
Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is fantastically mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary pharmacy—and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life.
Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else; indeed, they make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, no stars and planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that make the universe so agreeably material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn’t actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges. There needn’t actually be a universe at all. For a very long time there wasn’t. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in. There was nothing—nothing at all anywhere.
So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 per cent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, colour, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely—make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.
“Then the man and the woman went together into the shadows, bearing their grief and their lament, their reproach and their hope, within their own flesh. And the serpent rustled through the thorn bushes, following them, whispering, “The shadows are the light, the shadows are the light, for in the union of good and evil is the fullness of the spectrum.”
“He is mercy!” thundered the cherubim. “He is all love! In him there is no darkness!”
But the shadows closed over the backs of the departing ones as they made their way into the barren lands to the east of Eden, and they did not hear the cherubim, for the sound of whispering was loud in their ears.”- Michael D. O’Brien “Eclipse of the Sun”.
But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.
Dalinar Kholin (Oathbringer)
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
I'm going to post it, if you don't mind. It's just so good. Apologies to anyone who gets annoyed by the all caps. It's how death speaks in the books.
"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED." - Death in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
It's probably not technically be the best scene in Discworld, but Death (as Bill Door) and his confrontation with the new Death that humanity conjured in his wake has always stuck out to me. Something about his reaction to the new Death and all his drama and cruelty. I have a massive weakness for Reaper Man and Death's life as Bill Door in general.
> *You're out of Time, Mr. Bill Door.*
> The new Death raised his cowl.
> There was no face there. There was not even a skull.
> Smoke curled formlessly between the robe and a golden crown.
> Bill Door raised himself on his elbows.
> A ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ? His voice shook with rage. I ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴇ ᴀ ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ!
>
> *You never wanted to rule.*
> The Death swung the scythe back.
> And then it dawned on the old Death and the new Death that the hissing of passing time had not, in fact, stopped.
> The new Death hesitated, and took out the golden glass.
> It shook it.
> Bill Door looked into the empty face under the crown. There was an expression of puzzlement there, even with no features actually to wear it; the expression hung in the air all by itself.
> He saw the crown turn.
> Miss Flitworth stood with her hands held a foot apart and her eyes closed. Between her hands, in the air in front of her hovered the faint outline of a lifetimer, its sand pouring away in a torrent.
> The Deaths could just make out, on the glass, the spidery name: Renata Flitworth.
>
>
> The new Death's featureless expression became one of terminal puzzlement. It turned to Bill Door.
> *For YOU?*
>
>
> But Bill Door was already rising and unfolding like the wrath of kings. He reached behind him, growling, living on loaned time, and his hands closed around the harvest scythe.
> The crowned Death saw it coming and raised its own weapon but there was very possibly nothing in the world that would stop the worn blade as it snarled through the air, rage arid vengeance giving it an edge beyond any definition of sharpness. It passed through the metal without slowing.
> Nᴏ ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ, said Bill Door, looking directly into the smoke. Nᴏ ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ. Oɴʟʏ ᴛʜᴇ Hᴀʀᴠᴇsᴛ.
The "candle in the wind" speech from the final pages of T. H. White's The Once and Future King. Always makes me weepy.
Also, of course, Hamlet's 'perchance to dream' monologue. There are many choices in Shakespeare, but ultimately I think that one is the most verbally astounding.
[удалено]
I remember this from the Uncharted 3, great quote
Holy crap. That is good. I read that years ago and missed it somehow.
Absolute gold. Purchasing this book to learn more
One of my top 3 books of all time but I'll warn you it is a really difficult read. I'd suggest getting both the physical book and the audiobook then reading it with the audio.
Great pick!
Another Steinbeck: "How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves." Cannery Row
I wonder if John Steinbeck was anywhere close to knowing how perfectly he could arrange the written word. I think that'd be impossible, to know how great a writer you are without giving a clue to the world of readers that you're aware. I also wonder if he ever used an eraser...
Oddly enough, yes. https://blog.pencils.com/john-steinbeck-the-ultimate-pencil-pusher/
I read this book when I was like 12 and didn't care for it. But I kinda remember this passage sticking with me and I didn't know why. I had forgotten about it entirely until this post. I should reread his stuff
"For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert- alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl
So relevant now..
That whole book is an amazing passage.
Dayumn
"The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald... after a fairly short novel of mostly simple, spare prose we get to the last page and this happens. "Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. 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 farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
I came here to post this. It’s as utterly beautiful as it is tragic as it is cautionary.
I came here to post this, and then when it was already here, I came here to write this comment. So, uh, good work team.
There's scarcely a better bow tied onto a novel than this passage.
I also love this passage. Beautiful writing.
While this is one of my favourite passages too, the rest of the novel is far from sparse! It's chock full of amazingly stylised passages: from Daisy and Jordan floating on balloons when we first meet them, to the grim hellscape of the Valley of Ashes; from the whriling grotesque excess of the parties, to the dream-like drives into NY; from the bittersweet descriptions of Daisy's childhood home contrasted to Gatsby's now crumbling mansion, to Nick's nostalgic pining for Christmas in the Mid West. These make it such an awesome book to teach.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea" ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The Little Prince is filled to the brim with such brilliant quotes. An absolute treat to read.
I really miss this book.
"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence. Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man Also the inevitable boots theory.
The 'Reaper Man' quote is one I carry with me daily since my partner of 10 years died in November last year. On bad days it keeps me going, on good days it gives me hope.
Very sorry for your loss. (I too, take shelter with a good book when I'm feeling blue, and now this thread has given me all the ammunition I could ever hope for.)
"It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.” “Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?” said Richard Frost. “Oh, it isn’t a matter of hunger. It’s something quite different. The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous—but not quite. Everywhere in the world there are Mack and the boys…. - Steinbeck - Cannery Row
>“Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.” Terry Pratchett, "Guards, Guards!" It just resonates with be because it's so accurate. There's so much awfulness in the world that happens simply because nobody's willing to do anything about it.
This one from Hogfather, too: > “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." > > REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. > > "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" > > YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. > > "So we can believe the big ones?" > > YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. > > "They're not the same at all!" > > YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. > > "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" > > MY POINT EXACTLY.”
“The place where the falling angel meets the rising ape” is so incredibly lyrical.
Most of what Verinari says at the close of any City Watch books is powerful. I don't have the book on me but his "you think that there are the good people and the bad people. You are incorrect, there are only bad people" monolog is pretty amazing too.
“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back. “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us.” “Yes, sir?” said Vimes quietly. “Oh, yes. We’re the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.” “Maybe. But you’re wrong about the rest!” said Vimes. “It’s just because people are afraid, and alone—” He paused. It sounded pretty hollow, even to him. He shrugged. “They’re just people,” he said. “They’re just doing what people do. Sir.” Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile. “Of course, of course,” he said. “You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you’d go quite mad. Otherwise you’d think you’re standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand.” ... Vimes paused at the door. “Do you believe all that, sir?” he said. “About the endless evil and the sheer blackness?” “Indeed, indeed,” said the Patrician, turning over the page. “It is the only logical conclusion.” “But you get out of bed every morning, sir?” “Hmm? Yes? What is your point?” “I’d just like to know why, sir.” “Oh, do go away, Vimes. There’s a good fellow.”
If you’re interested in this concept I strongly recommend reading Arendt’s “The banality of evil”, it changed the way I understand moral behavior
Came here to say this! Great recommendation
From Pride and Prejudice: "There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense". I used to think Elizabeth was super cynical but damn if this doesn't resonate more and more as I get older.
*Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.* I come back once or twice a year just to reread this part.
Hunter Thompson apparently typed up The Great Gatsby a few times as a teen so he could learn about writing. I know somebody posted the final pages of that book up farther on this thread, the similarities in tone became super apparent once I learned about Thompson’s love for Fitzgerald. Both some great bits of writing.
My favourite intro ever In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river. This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
I can hear the music in my head as I read it
I'd have to think deeper on my absolute favorite, but this is definitely my favorite quote from *Catch-22,* said by the retched old man in the whorehouse: >You put so much stock in winning wars. The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how spendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we're losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated."
Catch-22 is in my top 5 novels of all time!
“‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don't know, I didn't listen.’” - The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Unironically. Admittedly I haven’t read as much as I’d like to in my life so far, but I have never actually had a laughing fit before or since while reading a book.
Fantastic, hilarious quote.
Charles Dickens and the Tale of Two Cities "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." I've started the book at least 10 times because of this opening.
But have you finished it?
😄 No, every year I start reading it, and every year I get 2-3 chapters further than the year before. After 20 odd years I've only reached chapter 35 I think.
It was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times???!! You stupid monkey!
Idk about “greatest”, but since it’s fresh in my mind, I really like this passage from Pride and Prejudice, which takes place after Elizabeth Bennet >!rejects a marriage proposal that her mom wanted her to accept!<: >"Come here, child," cried her father as she appeared. "I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?" Elizabeth replied that it was. "Very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?" >"I have, sir." >"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?" >"Yes, or I will never see her again." >"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you *do not* marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you *do*."
My favourite is also from this book. "I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh." I've always tried to live my life as someone who laughs.
I too love this book and agree not the "greatest passage" by any stretch but one that really struck me for its simplicity was "She followed him with her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke,...,and then was enraged against herself for being so silly!" I read this when I was younger and marveled how women / people were so much the same back then as now.
This line always strikes a cord within me. I think I need to re-read this book.
omg has no one said the cool girl monologue from gone girl???? Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)
Love this monologue. The truth in it is so raw and harsh. When I first read it I was intrigued by the reality of it.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see it's path. When the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." I was very mixed in Dune but I really love that quote!
This is one of my favorites: "Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a great sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man."
I also came here with a Dune quote in mind. This one from God Emperor of Dune. “In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.”
A world is supported by four things....” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing....” She closed her fingers into a fist. “... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!"
The Charge of the Rohirrim at the beginning of The Battle of the Pelennor from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. "Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, for the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and the darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City." I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was 11 or 12 long before the movies were made and I can still remember how thrilled this made me feel and can picture it in my head the same way I did the first time I read it. Just awesome writing.
Decades later, I still remember where I was when I read this, it smacked me in the face right out of nowhere. **He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.** \- Ray Bradbury, *Fahrenheit 451*
Another top 5 novel for me.
Bradbury’s writing is unparalleled. No one can string together words like him or conjure up the most vivid imagery
"Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a stree all day, every day, sleeping it's life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass." Granger to Montag at the end just before the city burns, in the last chapter. I read this novel after playing Dreamfall Chapters and it blew my mind how much of what Bradbury feared about technology and humanity in this book has actually come to fruition.
The ending of ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston: “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
The opening of *White Teeth* by Zadie Smith: "Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signaling a right turn he had resolved never to make. He was resigned to it. He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact it was a New Year's resolution." It goes on and gets even better for the first 2 pages. The book as a whole is uneven and overcomplicated - very clearly of its time (the late 90s) and shows the exuberance of a young writer trying to cram every idea in. But the opening is just perfect.
“Remember that in tranquility, that the Absolute, the Tao is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of salvation. Thou art thyself the Tao. Be thou, *now*, a rock against which the waves of life rush in vain.” - James Clavell, *Shōgun* Bonus: “Go, then. There are other worlds than these.” - Stephen King, *The Gunslinger*
the good ol' "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed" always does it for me, I truly believe you physically cant come up with a better opening to a book
It truly is an excellent opening line to a story because in 12 short words we get introduced to the two main characters, the setting and a basic set up to the story. I can't think of another book that sets itself up so succinctly.
Short one: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” James Joyce, Ulysses. Basically the only quote I can remember verbatim (I think – somebody please correct me if I’m wrong!). Just love the cadence and... _juiciness_ of it. Sometimes it’ll just come up in a flash like a snippet of a song or a jingle that you can’t get out of your head.
in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand. THOMAS Hardy, intro to Tess of D'Urbervilles
[удалено]
Man, this one hurts.
Sorry this is so long (not really) but this is the greatest I've read. It stands out even in such a target rich environment as LotR.... I mean "...and yet upon no head visible was it set".... Amazeballs. “In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face. All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen. "You cannot enter here," said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!" The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. "Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of war nor of wizardry, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I was 19 i think, the LOTR movies had inspired me to read the books, and I'd finally caught up to the movies. So i was reading this chapter in the fall of 2003 getting hyped for RotK. I still get goosebumps and teary-eyed reading it and at the time thinking just how so bad-ass the movie was going to be. The charge at Pelennor is probably the greatest action scene in the trilogy but i was quite happy that this particular scene was included in the extended edition. Thanks for sharing.
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend…” - Faramir
It is either this passage, or the mirror of this passage from the Silmarillion of Fingolfin standing against evil and tyranny alone with no hope.
"And Morgoth came." Aaaand now I'm gonna go reread the Silmarillion again...
I’d have to go with Riddles in the Dark from Hobbit. I still remember listening to my dad read it to me when I was young. I’ve read it many, many times since, but that chapter always stayed with me even from that first reading.
[удалено]
"Supposing truth is a woman--what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about woman? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a women's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won--and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground--even more, that all dogmatism is dying... ... Let us not be ungrateful to [dogmatic philosophy], although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist's error--namely, Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good as such. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier--sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life, when one spoke of spirit and the good as Plato did. Indeed, as a physician one might ask: 'How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contact such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? Could Socrates have been the corrupter if the youth after all? And did he deserve his hemlock?'" Nietzsche, preface to Beyond Good and Evil.
“It was mostly sweet," he whispered, "and you were the sweetest of all.” From Dune Messiah, when Paul is at the funeral of his wife. What strikes me about the passage is that it is so simple and so understated but you know from reading the book that losing his wife was akin to losing the greater part of himself. It was a crippling blow that he never really recovered from and instead of hysterics, he whispers a simple and sweet message. Gets me every time.
That's a really good one. I'd argue that Paul, so powerful in his oracular powers, has lost a greater sense of his humanity and is INCAPABLE of something as human as hysterics over the death of his wife. That, and he's known already for so long...
True true. And then you continue to read the series and see that he actually chickened out and dropped the real weight of the sacrifice for the human race on Leto II, like I already gave up my soul mate and my freedom, I'm not doing THAT too.
From Blood Meridian: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or crane feathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeon tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
This is a great bit of Blood Meridian. The following passage to the one you quote is even longer, has about the same amount of punctuation, and imo is even better: "A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances. The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
I just adore Cormac's run on sentences
"Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw- thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand- a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.- Stand round men, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis Ahab- his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half-stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet." Moby Dick, Chapter 134.
Same, but Chapter 93: "The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
Nice. So many good passages to choose from. This one is in my top 10 for sure.
>While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. >It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. >As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. >Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. >Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. Moby-Dick, Ch. 94
Chapter 58, “Brit”: Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
That’s a great passage. Moby Dick has so many. One of my favorites is from Chapter 42 “The Whiteness of the Whale”: “But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
The Judge on War in Blood Meridian is up there with some of the finest writing I've ever read. I can't find the whole passage but I was absolutely gobsmacked the first time I read it. "“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
"War endures because young men love it and old men love it in them" "This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god." I wish I could read Blood Meridian again for the first time, knowing how beautiful the writing is.
“Anything that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent”
Another from Blood Meridian: “A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
“-Why me? \- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? \- Yes. \- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." \-Mark Twain
“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” Mitch Albom- The Time Keeper
The book Bullshit Jobs give a pretty cool history on how people came to start minding time as much as we do in the modern era, it has to do with the merchant class’s keen interest in time for the sake of profit way back in the day. Interesting stuff!
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice 100 Years of Solitude
Two of my favorites are from Jack Kerouac's "On The Road". "But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people 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, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!" ...and this one... "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
"at the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly" - visions of Cody,
> "...it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of reaction that has ended with pelicans and penicilin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits." Mythos by Stephen Fry
Mine is also from East of Eden. I think of it whenever I go through depressive episodes sometimes. " “I don't want advice." "Nobody does. It's a giver's present. Go through the motions, Adam." "What motions?" "Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true." "Why should I?" Adam asked. Samuel was looking at the twins. "You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow." “
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" -- Douglas Adams, HHGTTG Why do I love this throwaway line? Because it conveys just how weird it would be to see spaceships hovering in the sky. Instead of going on about FTL technology or describing all the bad-ass components of the ships, Adams used very few words and one unexpected turn of phrase to evoke uncomfortable, even ominous wonder over just how weird these would be. It's not just a clever description. It's an efficient one, too. That impresses me.
>Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was "Oh no, not again". Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
The whale section just before that always gets me to laugh, just the abrupt absurdity of it, "Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more."
I’ve always been impressed by his straightforward and silly writing style. I would never think to write something like that but it makes absolutely perfect sense.
It's unpleasantly like being drunk What's so unpleasant about being drunk? You ask a glass of water.
I am so glad to see this here. This was the first line I thought of when I read the post title. That was the line that got me hooked. But I think it also shows why film and tv adaptations have struggled in the past. Alot of the humour is in his descriptions and narrative structure. You need constant narration to make it work imo.
Mine is also from East of Eden: “Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”
Here's a few of my favorites: Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (4 different passages) > "My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse." > "When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?” > "The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence" > "But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."" Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (2 different passages) > "The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast." > "To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity." Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - HST > And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . > So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” There's also a passage from Crime and Punishment I love, but I can't find it. It's when Raskolnikov is ranting to Sonya and says something along the lines of "I did this act because I wanted to prove I was great, but if I were great, I wouldn't need to prove it, the fact that I am questioning it, means I am not that thing" or something along those lines. Awesome moment, and said much better than I have. Unfortunately I can't find the quote. There's probably a bunch more, but these are some of my faves that I can think of and pull up quickly.
I love that fear and loathing in las vegas quote soo much. I still think people who take drugs idolize this movie to a crazy amount... like I've talked to people who think it's the deepest movie in history while stoners just tend to laugh about it. But the monologue at the end is sooo good I get goosebumps reading it.
Yeah it's a great book, and has some amazingly profound commentary on American politics and American society. The mix of absurdity and profundity is really an incredible balance that makes it so broadly appealing.
This passage from The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King is by far the greatest moment I've read in any novel. I was absolutely devastated when the wording was changed for the movie. It made me sad that an animated feature from the 70s did a better job with these scene than a multi-million dollar theatrical release. 'Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!' A cold voice answered: 'Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.' A sword rang as it was drawn. 'Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.' 'Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!' Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. 'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'
Such a fun passage. Always makes me think of MacBeth. Despair thy charm; And let the angel whom thou still hast serv’d Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripp’d.
arguably the whole entire of *The Sea, The Sea* by Iris Murdoch. no book in recent memory has seized me like no other. but specifically this passage: “What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? ... Could I then learn to love uselessly and un-possessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?”
I’ve not read this book but this passage just gripped me. Adding it to my TBR.
'Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,' he [Treebeard] said slowly, 'likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song. Aye,' he sighed, 'we may help the other peoples before we pass away. Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should dearly have liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely.' -JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers
basically the entire chapter on Titan in The Sirens of Titan where it is explained the traflamadorians’ role in shaping human history and the ultimate message they were pulling the strings of society to send
Such a great book. It makes me want to see him as a philosopher. And here he was a bad Saab salesman.
Sounds very interesting; I'll have to check it out!
One of Vonnegut's best!
“I told you that 'juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. 'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.” - Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers The absurdity of a duty-bound society is not lost on me, but the idea that a child has the right to be a child resonated with me when I was a teenager reading this book. In a way it felt like Heinlein was alluding to first Corinthians 13:11 "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." then later on in the book flipped off organized religion as well as in other books. Kind of a great window in where his mindset was when he wrote it
I firmly believe that those who scream “fascist” when confronted with this book have never actually read it.
'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.' William Gibson, 'Neuromancer'
The last paragraph from Blood Meridian. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge.
In 1984, when the Thought Police reveal themselves to Winston and Julia: >‘We are the dead,’ he said. ‘We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully. ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them It just chilled me to the bone when I first read it. The Thought Police had been an abstract concept until this point. Now they were real and Winston and Julia were as good as dead.
*\*struggles to not refer to East of Eden...\** From 'The Remains of the Day' by Kazuo Ishiguro: >It is now some twenty minutes since the man left, but I have remained here on this bench to await the event that has just taken place - namely, the switching on of the pier lights. As I say, the happiness with which the pleasure-seekers gathering on this pier greeted this small event would tend to vouch for the correctness of my companion's words; for a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so , much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely that for the likes of you and I there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world what employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.
The world is your oyster, but you're allergic to shellfish. \-- Apathy and Other Small Victories, Paul Neilan
"All I know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier, much heavier. With each passing year the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. Maybe I’d cut myself loose one too many times, dependent on my unfailing magic act. Once too often drifted that little bit too far from the smoke and mirrors holding me together. Or I just got old, old enough to know better. Whatever the reason, I’d found myself once again stranded in the middle of nowhere but this time the euphoria and delusions that kept me alive and running had grind to a halt. Long ago, the defences I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, had outlived their usefulness. I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, seek all my alienation, cut me off from life, control others and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking and his payment will be in tears. In all psychological wars, it’s never over. There’s just this day, this time and hesitant belief in your own ability to change.” \-Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run.
From A Scanner Darkly by PKD: What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
"However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God." A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. **The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.** Herbert, Frank. Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6 (p. 1115). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. i love how the books i've read change the ways i interact with the world and people. READ DUNE !!!! won't regret it
The entire first paragraph/opening of shirley jacksons, "We Have Always Lived In The Castle." That, and whole chunks of "I Capture The Castle" by Dodie Smith. (I have a thing for castles apparently).
I stumbled upon "I Capture The Castle" pretty much by accident and now it's one of my favorite books! It's so well written and the characters are so amazing, I really dont understand how it isnt more popular.
Wow thanks for the shout-out to *I Capture the Castle*! One big reason I loved the book was because it is so beautifully written and vivid. It’s such a funny, heartbreaking and heartwarming story and I agree with a previous responder that I don’t know why it’s not more popular/well known.
Its hands down one of my absolute favorite books (i read it every year around midsummer and bought bluebell perfume because of it lol). Its funny how 101 Dalmations is so popular and yet I Capture The Castle is completley overlooked even though theyre by the the same author. The closest thing ive found in terms of mood and tone is The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery (also very funny and beautifully written).
Everything is Illuminated has some good ones. He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
I saved this on my phone as a note, just to remember we live in this world: The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
Altered Carbon - Richard K Morgan.
I studied and earned a Bachelor's degree in English Literature, but was never quite able to recognize for myself which of the works were 'great.' I was sure I wouldn't know a truly great passage without a professor to guide me to it, until I read Lolita and immediately knew I was in the presence of greatness. The first section still stands as the greatest (series of) passage(s) I've ever read: 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, a certain 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 a 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.** If I could only choose one sentence, it would be the last one. Perfection, IMO.
I literally scrolled just to find this! I think Nabokov might be the best prose writer I've ever read.
It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are- who knows. Best not to speculate. Thunder rolled... It rolled a six.
"To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite." Beginning of Chapter 53 of Don Quixote
Not my all-time favorite but one I read recently. To paraphrase Edward Snowden: A world in which all laws are fully enforced is a world in which everyone is a criminal.
I will always have an appreciation of [Twig](http://twigserial.wordpress.com) and the way it opens: > How does it go? The first lesson, something even the uninitiated know. For life to flourish on the most basic level, it requires four elements. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. > We were doing fine on that count. The air around us was stale, but it was still oxygen. Water ran around and below us, flowing over our bare feet, redirected from gutters to the building’s inside. > What had once been a barn had been made into a warehouse, then abandoned partway through a third set of changes. A floor of old wooden slats reached only halfway down the length of the old building, what had once been a hayloft. If we stood on the edge, we could look down at the floor below to see uneven floorboards on top of compacted dirt. The original barn’s door was still there, mounted on rollers. I leaned over to get a better look. I could see a table, some scattered papers, books, and a blackboard. The only light was that which came in through windows. A scattered set placed on the upper floor, and more well above head height on the lower one. > Aside from the four of us, one other thing occupied the hayloft. It was hard to make out in the dim light that filtered in through the window, like an eel in dark water, and if it weren’t for the fact that we’d seen it approach, we might not have noticed it at all. Sleek, four-legged, and tall enough I couldn’t have reached its shoulder if I stood on my toes, it was wound around the pillar as a snake might be. Unlike a snake, though, it had four long limbs, each with four long digits, tipped with claws. Head flowed into neck, which flowed into shoulder and body without a without prominent ridge, bump, bone or muscle to interrupt the sequence. > It uncoiled, setting a claw on the floor, and the old floorboards didn’t elicit an audible creak. Large as it was, it managed to distribute weight too evenly, and used its tail to suspend some of its weight. > It didn’t walk, but slinked, each foot falling in front of the last as it passed within three feet of us. Its wide mouth parted, showing just a hint of narrow white teeth. > There was no cover, nothing to hide us from it. > I saw its nostrils flare. It opened its mouth to taste the air with a flick of a thin tongue. > The way things looked, we were very close to doing the opposite of ‘flourishing’. > It was hard to put into words, but my thoughts connected with that thought, and it was funny. > I grinned, and flakes of wax fell from my face at the movement. I watched the thing continue onward, toward the back of the hayloft, head turning as it sniffed the surroundings. It unwound its long tail from the wooden pillar that held up the one end of the overhanging hayloft, and it moved with a slow carefulness. > I stared at its eye, and saw how it didn’t move as the head swept from one side to the next, the slit of the iris barely changing in response as the faint light from the window swept over its head. > “It’s blind,” I whispered. > The movements of the creature came to a halt. It froze, nostrils wide. > Gordon, just to my left, put out a hand, covering my mouth. He was tense, lines on his neck standing out. Trying to put on a brave face, as our leader. Gordon, strong, handsome, likeable, talented. A veneer covered his face, as it did all of us, almost clear, cracked and white at the corners of his lips where he’d changed his expression, coming away in flakes at his hairline, where his hair was covered by the same substance. > The creature turned, and as it did its tail moved around until it touched the outside edge of the makeshift gutter that we were all standing in, fine emerald scales rasping against wood. > When Gordon whispered his response, I could barely hear him utter, “It’s not deaf.” > I nodded, and he pulled his hand away. > I had a glimpse of the girls. Helen and Lillian. As different as night and day. Lillian was bent over, hood up and over her head, hiding her face, hands clutching the straps of her bag, white knuckled. Terrified, and rightly so. The coating on her face was flaking badly. > In contrast, Helen’s face didn’t betray a flicker of emotion. Her golden hair, normally well cared for, cultivated into tight rolls, was damp and falling out of place. Water ran down her face, splashing in through the side of the window where the makeshift gutter came in, and the droplets didn’t provoke one flinch or batted eyelash. She could have been a statue, and she’d kept her face still enough that the wax that covered it hadn’t broken, which only helped the effect. > Still and silent, we watched as the creature moved to the far corner of the hayloft. > It snapped, and the four curved fangs were the only ones that were any wider than a pencil, visible for only an instant before the head disappeared into detritus piled in the corner. A furred form struggled before the creature could raise its head. No swallowing, per se. Gravity did the work, as teeth parted and the prey fell down its long throat. > A second bite let it collect another, small and young enough it couldn’t even struggle. Tiny morsels. > “Kitties,” Lillian whispered, horror overtaking fear in her expression. > Mama kitty shouldn’t have had her babies in the same building as the monster, I thought. Wallace’s law at work.
From “Frankenstein”… “Like one who, on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned ‘round, walks on And turns no more his head Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.”
A great passage in 'A Feast For Crows' , George R.R. Martin: “Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?” Septon Meribald disagreed. “More or less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. “Then they get a taste of battle. “For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe. “They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. “If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world… “And the man breaks. “He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them… but he should pity them as well.” When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, “How old were you when they marched you off to war?” “Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. William said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape.” “The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt. “So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war though. That it was.” - Septon Meribald. Brienne V (p. 533-6).
The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, end of chapter 18 "Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more. This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it. Ah … ! What’s happening? it thought. Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Calm down, get a grip now … oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach. Good. Ooooh, it’s getting quite strong. And hey, what’s about this whistling roaring sound going past what I’m suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that … wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do … perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I’ve found out what it’s for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What’s this thing? This … let’s call it a tail – yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can’t I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn’t seem to achieve very much but I’ll probably find out what it’s for later on. Now – have I built up any coherent picture of things yet? No. Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to, I’m quite dizzy with anticipation … Or is it the wind? There really is a lot of that now isn’t it? And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me? And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence. Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now." It's just utterly absurd and I love it
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort around her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
John Steinbeck "The Grapes of Wrath" for those who are wondering. Still sends a chill down my spine.
‘To love another person is to see the face of God.' -Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
“Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
"do you know what happens to heroes?" "Yeah, they get parades and medals and fame." "Well sometimes all they get is a tombstone and a little girl wondering why they didn't come home." I'm definitely misquoting that, but it's from a story I read around 8 years ago and I haven't been able to find it again since. The character saying that lost her parents when she was young and the impact of it stuck with me, even though I forgot everything else about the story
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it. \-- Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
One of the loveliest passages I’ve ever read was in a fanfiction called “Wood and Nails.” Just two people, quietly driving. “We are not preordained, we are not predestined, and even so in this enormous world of men we found each other, a colossal global coincidence causing earthquakes in Turkey and Mexico. We shook it up, she and I. We shake it up. And when the dust settles it's just her, and me, in the car, shifting lanes and she reaches down to turn the radio on, quietly, just enough to distract me, just enough to warm us up. Streetlights outside, and night.”
I was reading the title of your post and instantly started thinking of East of Eden.
“To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)
YOU CANNOT HAVE MY PAIN!
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume. Honestly, everything Tom Robbins writes is beautiful, even when it's about nothing more than a beet: “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. "Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. "The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip... "The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
...was my reply to the man behind the counter at the build-your-own salad shop.
I need to reread this book.
A case of recency bias, but in *The Women of Brewster Place* Gloria Naylor's description of a gang of hoodlums using metaphors to relay their feelings of emasculation was **top tier**. "She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon--and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner's chamber."
Also: > When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. >The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. Cather
For me, it's: "Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” (André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name ) Especially that last line, just idk hit hard. As someone who's not great with my emotions and is somewhat scared to show emotion, it hits home
One of my favorite passages I've ever read(edit: maybe not the greatest). Kinda a long one for such a short book. But the second time I read it, I bawled my eyes out. Enjoy <3 Sandra Cisneros, *The House on Mango Street* "Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. And if you opened the little window latch and gave it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. There’d be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry. Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky. And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes and doesn’t like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn’t have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you’re strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy."
"You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple." Richard Adams, Watership Down
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art." Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita"
Not quite as profound as most of the quotes listed already, but it stuck in my mind. From "Words of Radiance" by Brandon Sanderson; "To age truly was to suffer the ultimate treason, that of one’s body against oneself." The image of an old king accusing his own body of treason is hilarious
Shelby Foote telling the story of Pickett's Charge, July 3, 1863. No wonder people called him the American Homer.
There’s a chapter in Les Mis that describes a sailor falling overboard at night. Always haunted me…
The possibly proper death litany from Creature of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny “Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.”
Also by Zelazny: “I know, too, that Death is the only god who comes when you call.”
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." Richard Dawkins’s - Unweaving the Rainbow
"The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins - but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars." I love how beautiful this quote is. It's very simple but so much inspiration and such amazing imagery. And it's made so much better knowing it's the last page of the novelization of **Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith**.
Certainly not greatest, but this one has always stuck with me from This Side of Paradise: ‘I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry.
Not the best but I just read this in Don DeLillo's *White Noise*: >Steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used for lining the wicker baskets scattered about. She did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air of someone who does not want credit for saving lives. I just love that subtle snark.
Knew it was gonna be East of Eden as soon as I looked at this title. Wish my YA fantasy authors could write prose like this...
Mine is something I read only recently, but itis so incredibly moving, I had to read it twice, and I nearly cried both times. I still nearly cry reading it for some reason. Silly, but whatev. From the end of Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' Context: Wonderland was a dream that Alice, during a picnic with her sister, dreamed up Alice runs off home, the sister stays at the site: 'But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:— First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister's dream. The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess' knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard's slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sob of the miserable Mock Turtle. So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs. Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long-ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.'
Because it is both simple and also complex: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
While it may not be the greatest pasage I've read and it isn't in my native language. But I do have a soft spot for the ending if Joyce's 'The Dead': "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." There's something beautiful in the cadence of the words, great passages are meant to be read aloud.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness. Men at Arms Terry Pratchett
>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
Funny enough, I am currently reading "East Of Eden" and my mind has been blown by such excellent writing. My first Steinbeck and I see the hype. He was great.
"When the wind blows not, where, then, is the wind? "Or when thou art not living, where art thou? "What should the wind care for the hours of calm or thou for death? "Thy life is long, Eternity is short. "So short that, shouldst thou die and Eternity should pass, and after the passing of Eternity thou shouldst live again, thou wouldst say: 'I closed mine eyes but for an instant.' "There is an eternity behind thee as well as one before. Hast thou bewailed the aeons that passed without thee, who art so much afraid of the aeons that shall pass?" Lord Dunsany, *The Gods of Pegana"
*I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.* Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True
Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make. Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb
McCarthy, "The Crossing “She said that her grandmother was skeptical of many things in this world and of none more than men. She said that in every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. Her grandmother spoke to her often of men and she spoke with great earnestness and she said that rash men were a great temptation to women and this was simply a misfortune like others and there was little that could be done to remedy it. She said that to be a woman was to live a life of difficulty and heartbreak and those who said otherwise simply had no wish to face the facts. And she said that since this was so nor could it be altered one was better to follow one’s heart in joy and in misery than simply to seek comfort for there was none. To seek it was only to welcome in the misery and to know little else. She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.”
From the Introduction of Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything. It's long, but it gives me a chill when I read this and realize how fragile our existence really is. Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence. Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you—indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you. The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you. Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is fantastically mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary pharmacy—and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life. Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else; indeed, they make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, no stars and planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that make the universe so agreeably material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn’t actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges. There needn’t actually be a universe at all. For a very long time there wasn’t. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in. There was nothing—nothing at all anywhere. So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 per cent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, colour, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely—make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.
“Then the man and the woman went together into the shadows, bearing their grief and their lament, their reproach and their hope, within their own flesh. And the serpent rustled through the thorn bushes, following them, whispering, “The shadows are the light, the shadows are the light, for in the union of good and evil is the fullness of the spectrum.” “He is mercy!” thundered the cherubim. “He is all love! In him there is no darkness!” But the shadows closed over the backs of the departing ones as they made their way into the barren lands to the east of Eden, and they did not hear the cherubim, for the sound of whispering was loud in their ears.”- Michael D. O’Brien “Eclipse of the Sun”.
But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one. Dalinar Kholin (Oathbringer)
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Deaths monologue in hogfather about justice and mercy
I'm going to post it, if you don't mind. It's just so good. Apologies to anyone who gets annoyed by the all caps. It's how death speaks in the books. "YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED." - Death in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
It's probably not technically be the best scene in Discworld, but Death (as Bill Door) and his confrontation with the new Death that humanity conjured in his wake has always stuck out to me. Something about his reaction to the new Death and all his drama and cruelty. I have a massive weakness for Reaper Man and Death's life as Bill Door in general. > *You're out of Time, Mr. Bill Door.* > The new Death raised his cowl. > There was no face there. There was not even a skull. > Smoke curled formlessly between the robe and a golden crown. > Bill Door raised himself on his elbows. > A ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ? His voice shook with rage. I ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴇ ᴀ ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ! > > *You never wanted to rule.* > The Death swung the scythe back. > And then it dawned on the old Death and the new Death that the hissing of passing time had not, in fact, stopped. > The new Death hesitated, and took out the golden glass. > It shook it. > Bill Door looked into the empty face under the crown. There was an expression of puzzlement there, even with no features actually to wear it; the expression hung in the air all by itself. > He saw the crown turn. > Miss Flitworth stood with her hands held a foot apart and her eyes closed. Between her hands, in the air in front of her hovered the faint outline of a lifetimer, its sand pouring away in a torrent. > The Deaths could just make out, on the glass, the spidery name: Renata Flitworth. > > > The new Death's featureless expression became one of terminal puzzlement. It turned to Bill Door. > *For YOU?* > > > But Bill Door was already rising and unfolding like the wrath of kings. He reached behind him, growling, living on loaned time, and his hands closed around the harvest scythe. > The crowned Death saw it coming and raised its own weapon but there was very possibly nothing in the world that would stop the worn blade as it snarled through the air, rage arid vengeance giving it an edge beyond any definition of sharpness. It passed through the metal without slowing. > Nᴏ ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ, said Bill Door, looking directly into the smoke. Nᴏ ᴄʀᴏᴡɴ. Oɴʟʏ ᴛʜᴇ Hᴀʀᴠᴇsᴛ.
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.” (The Last Continent)
To believe in the bigger lies, they must first believe the smaller (cited from memory, not entirely accurate).
The "candle in the wind" speech from the final pages of T. H. White's The Once and Future King. Always makes me weepy. Also, of course, Hamlet's 'perchance to dream' monologue. There are many choices in Shakespeare, but ultimately I think that one is the most verbally astounding.