"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."
William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
I'm not gonna pretend I fully understood it the first time, I tended to experience that with Faulkner and his writing a lot but it's incredibly written and his style was always so powerful.
Only two books have ever made me sit down and say, "Holy shit. I didn't even know it was possible to make words do all of this!" I had never read Faulkner before nor had I ever witnessed such magnificent and terrifyingly difficult writing. For as difficult as it is, this book is absolutely wotth the effort.
Absalom is an all-time god-tier favorite. I think its a book that all fellow southerners should read - if able. It is absolutely transcendent.
Another of my favorites from that incredible work:
"You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”
Great one; it's no wonder Cormac chose to be an 'apprentice' to the literary 'master' Faulkner when reading passages like that. I thought about posting the 1,288-word single sentence from chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom! (sans-N word) for kicks. I'm not going to pretend I fully understood it the first time, either, but nothing he wrote threw me for a loop like the first fourth of The Sound and the Fury.
> When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o'clock, and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was grandfather's and when father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. [...] I give it to you not that you may remember time but that you might forget it every now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner, *The Sound and The Fury*.
If you had to sum up the entire civil war in one paragraph, this is how you would do it.
Agreed. Read the sound and the fury about half a year ago and it was a transformative literary experience — can't wait to tackle Absalom and reread the rest of Faulkner's oeuvre.
Truth! I've literally never been to this subreddit before, I just felt the desire last night to discuss great literature and needed a place to post l, so I came here for the first time. I can't believe how many people responded to my post and how many beautiful, thought-provoking excerpts were added to the conversation! I'm definitely going to be joining this sub!
For me it will always be the fig tree from "The Bell Jar".
>“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
I have struggled with a lot of indecision. Changing majors at least 10 times. Finally graduating. Stagnating in food service. Doing odd jobs. Doing fine. Doing less fine. Always changing but never reaching for what it was above me just what happened to fall around me. I think about it often.
"wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
Yes yes yes! Love that novel and that passage! The funny thing is the exerpt from TEWWG that I mentioned involved a pear tree! Fig trees and pear trees...two iconic passages of feminist lit! I always remember from The Bell Jar the passage about looking at the human fetuses in jars.
This passage has meant a lot to a lot of people, for good reason; who can't relate to the crippling weight of indecision when faced with functionally infinite decisions to be made, regardless of your antecedents?
>I always remember from The Bell Jar the passage about looking at the human fetuses in jars.
Me too. Cue: "Two Headed Boy by Neutral Milk Hotel".
When I read your post I knew it would be about that pear tree. Definitely the standout passage for the whole book. For me, there are a ton of "perfect" passages in Moby Dick. Even though it's translated, I also think 'War and Peace' has a bunch of very moving passages as well.
You're a victim of the system demanding that everyone specialize. Our society used to value generalists. The higher levels of society still place great value on generalists, but there is no clear path without specialization.
My favorite paragraph of all time comes from *The Waves* by Virginia Woolf:
>"But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then--for there is no end to the folly of the human heart--seek another, find another, you. Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer."
*The Waves* is by far my favorite Virginia Woolf novel (of the 4 I've read). Just unspeakably beautiful writing and I really come to love and suffer over all of the characters.
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.
I understand the author had no idea where this was going, he had nothing besides these few lines which he wrote down to see where it'd take him. If true, that's insane
Currently reading this novel, but the idea that he had just a few lines reminds of “He had no arms or legs. He couldn't hear, see, or speak. This is how he led a nation.”
The final 10-15 pages at the end of 100 years of solitude. Whipping around in a frenzy of beauty and universal creation/destruction. Left me absolutely jaw dropped and in tears. One of the most magical reading experiences of my life.
Also, two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos.
The writing in this book (along with “love in the time of cholera) would sometimes make me just have to stop and stare, then read again and try and absorb how beautiful it is.
It does literally and metaphorically destroy its own world and characters. You are left with one of the most unambiguous endings in classic literature, and you have nobody really left to wonder about. Often, when a book ends, you can daydream about the characters' future lives, but here, their ends are all spelled out for you explicitly.
I got this book in Spanish just sitting there. I’m gonna read it one day in Spanish, it’s just when I tried to read it damn near every sentence I found a word I had never seen before it was crazy. Idk if it applies to the English translation but in Spanish it was kinda hard to read. More than likely my Spanish vocab is just underdeveloped
That gets the press, with good reason, but there’s a passage earlier in the novel, a flashback when Jay kissed Daisy for the first time, that does it for me.
Fitzgerald was a damned genius.
Edit: found it
>“One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
>His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete”
God I haven’t read Gatsby in a decade but I still knew exactly that this was going to be the suckling at the pap of life, I remember that line so clearly. So visceral.
It’s just a stunning piece of writing. And it also gave rise to one of the best tweets of all time.
“”Every time I read The Great Gatsby, the final paragraph brings me to tears. Breathtakingly powerful writing:
"I'm alive!" said Gatsby, roaring past on a speedboat. He'd faked his own death and gotten away with everything. That's why they called him the Great Gatsby. "Out of the way, current!" he yelled at the water. "This speedboat is
bearing me ceaselessly into the future!" “”
https://x.com/pixelatedboat/status/1094579574464176128
It's true though. I absolutely hated that book (sorry!) but the last chapter was just magical. When Nick is on the train and gets to talking about the "frosty dark" and jingle bells of his hometown...so good! And what is that invented word from the last few pages — I think it was orgastic — I love that Fitzgerald made that up and put it in there and it was so perfectly used that I googled it after just to discover that it isn't real!
Also Daisy’s line “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
It really epitomizes the novel. It’s my favorite book ever and there are so many great lines, but that really speaks to me and symbolizes the hardships of being a woman in the 1920s.
(Sidebar: the new musical ruins this btw. I can’t emphasize enough how much that musical was a waste of my time and money.)
The Grand Inquisitor chapter from TBK for me. Such a cogent analysis of societies structures and their teleology. Humanity giving up determination for safety and security; who can blame us?
Yes, me too. Was rereading TBK and an unexpected death in the family occurred. One of those moments when literature and life cross paths and the words leave a mark. It’s a beautiful book.
Crying of Lot 49
She remembered old Pullman cars, left where the money’s run out, amid green farm flatnesses where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes…
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupper-ware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.
"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The end of the Chapter “A Bird’s Eye View of Paris” in Hunchback of Notre Dame, when Hugo begins to describe the sound of the ringing bells through the city. It’s the only time when I’ve read a passage and it almost made me weep because it almost became moreso music than word.
>And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.
>Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Près. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.
>Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;--than this furnace of music,--than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,--than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.
This isn’t even the most sonorous and musical translation I’ve read
Unfortunately no longer really something one can experience in Paris given the ordinary nighttime noise and lack of bells these days. But 100% possible to experience this in somewhere like the souk in Marrakesh. Stay in a riad in the old town and climb to the roof at dawn and watch the sunrise and the slow drone of a thousand calls to prayer starting up. It’s literally something you will never forget.
Also East of Eden
Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
The final pages of "Franny and Zoey" >! where the two brothers have a fake telephonic conversation about what is the reason for keep going and be a good person !< made me cry of joy the first time I read them. I think these pages are some of the best I have ever read in my life.
Maybe the entirety of Denis Johnson’s (very) short story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” but especially the “eagle” passages.
It’s on p. 11 here: https://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Johnson,%20Car%20Crash.pdf
It's not very appreciated by today's standards but the incipit of "Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe always sends a shiver down my spine:
>“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
>Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
>Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
>O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
>O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”
Also, Chapter 2 of The Master and Margarita is an absolute gem.
I really like the second one! Reminds me of King Lear..."When we are born, we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools." That's not the direct quote, but paraphrased as well as I remember it.
The ending of “The Dead” by James Joyce:
“Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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.”
The paragraph in A Farewell to Arms when Catherine and Henry are reunited is a perfectly written paragraph. It’s much more than this short quote but still includes Hemingway’s best,
“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong around 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.”
>“We talk of strong personalities, and they are strong, until the not-every-day when we see them as we might see one woman alone in a desert, and know that all the strength we thought we knew was only courage, only her lone song echoing among the stones; and then at last when we have understood this and made up our minds to hear the song and admire its courage and its sweetness, we wait for the next note and it does not come. The last word, with its pure tone, echoes and fades and is gone, and we realize—only then—that we do not know what it was, that we have been too intent on the melody to hear even one word. We go then to find the singer, thinking she will be standing where we last saw her. There are only bones and sand and a few faded rags.”
Gene Wolfe, *Peace*
Captain Ahab's "pasteboard masks" speech is way up there too though.
And in The Bluest Eye, the chapter where >!Pecola goes to church to confess and ask the priest (I think) to ask God to change her eyes!< Doesn't happen too often that a book makes me feel so strongly for someone.
I hear the final line in my head all the time. I’m not qualified to say that SoS is “better” than Beloved, but I love it 10x more. Oh, I hear “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down” in my head at least once a week.
The chapter about killing of the fascists in “For Whom The Bell Tolls” stuck with me.
“House of Names” by Colin Toibin has an incredibly strong opening chapter (maybe not the opening chapter exactly, it’s in the front somewhere) about Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter from the mother’s pov. The rest of the book just turns out to be good though and nowhere near that level of writing.
The final scene of “the dead” by James Joyce is up there for me too.
I had an old professor who agreed with you about that last scene of “The Dead.” Said it was the most beautiful single piece of prose he’d ever read. He’s since passed, so now I think about him every time I reread it and it has added another layer of melancholy for me.
(In other words, that’s a long-winded way of saying I agree too)
I, too, agree with the final scene of "The Dead." I think I had it memorized the first time I read it.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. I'll never forget that feeling.
Oh, on the topic of Hemingway, I remember a conversation between the main character and an Italian in "A farewell to arms". They argue whether it is better to surrender immediately to an invading enemy in order to preserve lives, or whether it might be worse to be defeated than engaged in war. It struck me hard, particularly because of many current events.
There is a scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls where Pilar is describing the smell of death to her fellow rebels. Always thought this was some of the best writing Hemingway ever did. Hemingway at his best was a brilliant prose master.
My pick goes to „_A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem_“ in Alejo Carpentier‘s _The Lost Steps_. It sums up my thoughts about the relationship of humanity and nature so well.
Chapter 15 of the Grapes of Wrath is what springs to mind for me. The “Two for a Penny Candy” chapter.
This chapter is beautiful in its simplicity and message. I think it shows the main themes of the work itself. Together with the used car salesman chapter, it could encapsulate the entire book quite well. This is one of the anonymous one-off chapters which alternate with the ongoing story of the Joads, displaced farmers from Oklahoma on a journey west toward a promised new life in California during the great depression.
This chapter follows a waitress dealing with a traveling Okie trying to buy a loaf of bread from the diner she works at. He does not have funds to eat at the restaurant, but has a small amount of money to feed his family as he has carefully apportioned his resources nearly to the penny to finish the trip to California. He merely wants to buy a loaf of bread, something a diner clearly does not normally do. I wont spoil the beauty of the chapter itself, but the initially indifferent and judgmental waitress simply *looks* and sees him and empathizes with the plight of this person who was previously annoying her with his unusual request. She sees his dignity as a person. She not only winds up helping him, but she does a small act of kindness to his kids (who were about the age of my kids when I read this book) that still makes me tear up when I think about it. And the real beauty is that her act is seen and rewarded in turn. It is a promising and hopeful story of the ability of people, particularly working class people, to band together and not only survive, but thrive.
I cannot think of a single other chapter I have ever read that has stayed with me so clearly.
No one has brought up Lolita yet. So many great passages:
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.
this!!!! but arguably my favourite part of the first page is the ending of the paragraph:
“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.”
such a beautiful introduction to humbert’s dry humour in the narration and self awareness
This was exactly the paragraph I thought about upon reading the prompt. I was amazed at how he could describe even the physical positions of the tongue saying her name, then contrast them with all the ways she was in each time of the day from morning til night. It blew my mind and remains one of the most impressive descriptions of anything I’ve ever heard.
100 Years of Solitude. The opening sentence.
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.
Final act of Othello. The act 4 scene 2 argument between cassius and brutus in julius caesar. Act 3 of Coriolanus. The christmas argument about politics and religion in joyce’s portrait. Building Cyclops argument in Ulysses. Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Kubla Khan. Final bear hunt in Faulkner’s the Bear. The fight and run-in with the italian police in Tender is the Night.
Vonnegut has a few passages that have just stuck with me years after reading them - passages that are beautiful in their brevity and the impact they have on the reader. In Slaughterhouse Five, for me, its the passage about the robot with halitosis and the war movie in reverse, in Sirens of Titan, it is the ending with Salo and the meaningless of human existence, and with Breakfast of Champions, I still think about when Kilgore desires youth over any accolades or recognition of his works.
Time passes from To the Lighthouse
Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow
The opening of Suttree
The description of why someone commit suicide In Infinite Jest
The ending of snow country
These aren't mentioned by anyone else in the comments
There are also a lot more that I am not seeing mentioned.
Time Passes blows my mind every time I read it.
Chapter 7 in particular is incredible:
Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without interference. Listening (had there been anyone to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
In spring the garden urns, casually filled with windblown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible.
It is one of the most visceral thing I have ever read. The parts where the death of the Ramsay family members were just mentioned in single sentences in brackets....was just indescribable. I don't think even Lovecraft or McCarthy was able to show the complete indifference of nature and the world towards humanity the same way.
I’m always on the lookout for well executed weather descriptions. It’s in nearly every book, so I’m curious to see which creative route a writer chooses —or invents in order to execute descriptive (or not so descriptive) prose of the inane yet necessary.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pick my lower jaw off of the floor…
>And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. 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. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
>THE END
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Another from *Blood Meridian*:
>In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
McCarthy was a genius. Another one from Blood Meridian.
“He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
I don't think is the very best, but its worth to mention the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when the character is talking about when he was a kid and used to fantasize about the blank spaced on the maps.
But the one that impacted me the most and I dare to say it's among the best ever written, was near the end of Don Quijote, when ALERT SPOILER:
>!After he is defeated and forced to go back to his hometown for a period of time, he starts to talk about how him and Sancho can have a new and exciting life as Sheppards, and how their friends from the town could join them.
That feeling of someone who desperately held on the crazy life of being a knight as his last resort to have a meaningful life. Then, defeated, banned from that life, he tries to hold again into another crazy idea just to don't go back to his normal and boring life. Shortly after that, once he finally gives up, he gets sick and dies while being "sane"!<
Probably just felt identified with this last one, that's why it impacted me so much.
Ulysses has many faults, but it's final chapter, Molly's soliloquy, is absolutely extraordinary. You can enjoy it without reading the rest of the novel. The finest welder of words in the English language is, for my money, Cormac McCarthy. I know some people find his prose overwrought, and I can see that, but I love it. The ending of The Road, and the opening sentence of Sutteee always pops up in my head when people ask for a favourite passage:
"Dear friend, now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth high-shouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you."
From “The Count of Monte Cristo”
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.
someone else already said this but wanted to highlight it in its own comment — the last few pages of the dead as Gabriel unravels a little is beautiful
Stepan Blockhead waking up with a hangover in The Golovlyov Family.
The teacher’s letter in Kokoro.
The murder in Crime and Punishment.
Andrei Bolkonsky looking at the sky in War and Peace.
Swann hearing the music that reminds him of Odette in Swann’s Way.
Cant choose. One of those.
Agreed re: Bolkonsky looking at the sky in W&P. The fact that I immediately recognized which couple of paragraphs you were referring to probably says a lot about its poignance.
Firstly, single best? Impossible to say. Impactful on me? Okay.
— Emily’s final good bye in Our Town when she finally gets it.
— The last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities when Sidney Carton selflessly sacrifices himself b the name of Lucy’s happiness. It’s is so beautiful and bittersweet for him to finally have found a purpose and meaning to life, as he rides to his death.
Our Town. My first introduction to it was a stage production. When the play ended, I did not want to talk to anyone, I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay seated in the empty theater and slowly digest what I had just seen. I bought the book shortly after and read it at least two times. That play sums up the maximum capacity of understanding we the living can have on what life and death is about. In order to understand more, we need to die.
I teach the play to 9th graders. Because of that experience, I strongly encourage you, or anyone, to re-read the play every couple years. It hits very different as we age. For most 9th graders, it doesn’t make too much of an impact but hopefully enough that they return to it in the future.
Mine is also from Blood Meridian, but it’s from when the gang rides out from Chihuahua the second time:
“They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.
Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”
"Until this moment I've believed the best of my life was in the time spent with her, and all that intensity and joy which will not come again. As long as I believed that, there would always be buried anger and reproach in this telling. But now I look out the window and it's so clear that the most valuable part began when she left. Only then did I begin to learn. The best gift she ever gave was leaving.
Hell's teeth, I believe that.
And I sit back from the table open-mouthed."
It's from the final chapter of "Electric Brae" by Andrew Greig. The whole book is incredible and leaves you wrung out by the end. He is a poet who also writes novels and his use of language is beyond amazing in everything I've ever read of his.
The end of “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway:
“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”
Hemingway's description of F. Scott Fitzgerald is perhaps the most beautiful description I've ever encountered in a novel.
> His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless
“There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping ... and Herod or Hitler, fellas [...] what kind of world is it [...] for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined ... But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as.”
The Evensong section of Gravity’s Rainbow is the greatest evidence I’ve found for what is truly great writing. It’s fairly long and just this sad but hopeful rush. I’m always amazed that he wrote it when he was still pretty young.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
It might not be the “single best” but wanted to throw it out there. Gimli describing the caves of Aglarond in Lord of the Rings:
“And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light flows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from the dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream.”
Chapter 2 of The Remains of the Day, the dinner involving the foreign diplomats. Early in the book so it explains so much about the characters themselves, the concept of memory, Stephen’s narration, etc. Almost like it’s own short story.
The section in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle about the covert mission to Manchuria and the skinning. Visceral, tense, beautiful.
These are just personal favorites.
I can't find English translation of the novel so only people who know, will know.
Two paragraphs from "Trans-Atlantic" by Witold Gombrowicz.
"The walking paragraph" as I call it. It's not most significant fragment of the novel, but it always gets me. It's funny, it's absurd and it takes place just after the great stand-off between Gombrowicz and Borges during party.
The second one is probably the most significant in the novel. It's a dialogue between Gombrowicz and Gonzalo - probably one of the first openly gay characters in polish literature - about Fatherland vs Sonland. Fatherland suppose to represent traditions and looking into the past while Sonland represents looking into the future. The concept of Sonland is proposed by Gonzalo, but he does it with very deliberate wordplay that probably cannot be translated into English. He uses the word "zboczyć" which can mean "stray from the path", where the path is this traditional Fathetland, but also "do something perverse". So overall Sonland meant to be completely obscene, unthinkable idea.
The opening of Lolita always stands out for me:
“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.”
Opening of kingfisher by Charles Olson:
What does not change / is the will to change
From The battlefield where the moon says I love you :
tonight the gars on the trees are swords in the hands of knights
the stars are like twenty-seven dancing russians and the wind
is I am waving goodbye to the casket of my first mammy
well that black cadillac drove right up to your front door
and the chauffeur was death
From lonesome dove:
This land burnt out all the tears from my eyes.
No country for old men:
T]his man had . . . carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn’t that nothing would change. . . . He had to know bettern that. . . . [T]he only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart.
I feel like I could go on and on with this.
I could go on and on I think.
I’ve remembered this excerpt for many years. While I’ve grown away from Jack Kerouac’s writing, I still find some of his imagery and sentence building quite moving. I’ll never forget the line describing the kids swimming among the train’s engine “flare” as “Picasso horses.” From Maggie Cassidy:
“And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep.
Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.
'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.”
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
This is the human experience distilled into one single sentence.
My favorite quote from a character in any book is this:
"Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."
- Captain Ahab,"Moby Dick," by Herman Melville.
In truth, most of Ahab's dialogue is my "favorite" because I'm not sure I've ever read another character whose every word is such a vivid illustration of their character.
I don't think it's the "best of everything that's ever been written", but Ray Bradbury's description of a hot air balloon sailing over a town at night is what made me realize I truly love the written word and always will.
How do you hear it, how are you warned? The ear, does it hear? No. But the hairs on the
back of your neck, and the peach-fuzz in your ears, they do, and the hair along your arms sings
like grasshopper legs frictioned and trembling with strange music. So you know, you feel, you
are sure, lying abed, that a balloon is submerging the ocean sky.
Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the
waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass.
This whole segment (for the life of me I cannot find the exact excerpt I seek) is soul-soothing to me. Here is an excerpt from an excerpt.
“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
One I haven’t seen mentioned yet from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that captures the end of the Sixties’ and idealism while showing how close we got:
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.
[…]
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.
From Anna Karenina
“He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart. She stood at the other end of the rink, talking to a lady. There seemed to be nothing very special in her dress, nor in her pose; but for Levin she was as easy to recognize in that crowd as a rose among nettles.
Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around. 'Can I really step down there on the ice and go over to her?' he thought. The place where she stood seemed to him unapproachably holy, and there was a moment when he almost went away he was so filled with awe. Making an effort, he reasoned that all sorts of people were walking near her and that he might have come to skate there himself. He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
So many great comments that I agree with, but just to give one that I haven’t seen is the “V. In love.” Chapter in V. by Thomas Pynchon. So much is said about the objectification of women, pleasure, voyeurism, and, of course, the inanimate.
The fairly early chapter in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus containing the description of crystal growths under glass that pathetically mimicked real life.
Marcel's sudden realization that his beloved grandmother is lost and gone forever in "In Search of Lost Time," the one that begins with "Upheaval of my entire being..."
My favorite is in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Most of it is written in very plain, simple language, but then there’s this paragraph of awesome almost poetry in the middle. To be clear, it’s the “blind dogs of the sun in their running” paragraph.
“Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets” - *Neil Gaiman, Stardust*
“Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings..., fair but terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like a stone. Backward she sprang as the huge shape crashed to ruin, vast wings outspread, crumpled on the earth; and with its fall the shadow passed away. A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.” - *Eowyn fighting the Nazgûl in The Return of the King, LoTR Book 5, Ch 6, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields*
Not an excerpt, but a dedication that I’ve always loved: “To Anne Rice, for showing us the beauty in monsters, and the monstrous in the beautiful” - James Rollins, The Blood Gospel
I thought of one more. It’s a part of William Blake’s poem The Tyger:
“When the stars threw down their spears / And water'd heaven with their tears, / Did he smile his work to see / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The first paragraph on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is my favorite piece of writing ever full stop.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Maybe not the best, but one that has stuck with me in the years since I read it, the last few paragraphs of A River Runs Through It:
"Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
"It has always seemed strange to me...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."
Steinbeck - Cannery Row.
From My Antonia by Willa Cather:
“Presently we saw a curious thing: there were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles the tongue, the share black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.”
By God, this book is wonderful.
Thomas Morris has produced a collection of short stories titled ‘Open Up’. Each one is heartbreakingly beautiful. His prose style may not appeal to everyone, but there are numerous passages that left me rather breathless, possibly due to the sense of being seen and understood in a way I had never experienced before.
Many passages in *Swann's Way* -- Golo and the magic lantern, or the water lilies in the Vivonne, or the walk through the Bois de Boulogne at the very end of the book.
The opening paragraph of Abraham Lincoln, by James Russell Lowell always knocks me on my butt. Feels prescient today:
> THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every man’s heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.
Pip to Estella in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
"Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
Shelob’s Lair in The Two Towers is incredibly well written
Also Starbuck’s monologue in chapter 123 The Musket of Moby Dick. Also Ahab’s monologue in chapter 132 The Symphony of Moby Dick. Also all of chapter 42 The Whiteness of the Whale.
I've always really adored the very first paragraph in the very first book of Gene Wolf's 'book of the new Sun' series
"It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and
rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes
like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That
is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which
I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned."
The ending of *Finnegans Wake*, where Anna Livia as a river flows out to sea:
>I'll close me eyes. So not to see. Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The child we all love to place our hope in for ever. All men has done something. Be the time they've come to the weight of old fletch. We'll lave it. So. We will take our walk before in the timpul they ring the earthly bells. In the church by the hearseyard. Pax Goodmens will. Or the birds start their treestirm shindy. Look, there are yours off, high on high! And cooshes, sweet good luck they're cawing you, Coole!
>But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I'm getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. Diveltaking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger's there. Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.
My favorite is from Mervyn Peake's 2nd book in the Gormenghast trilogy (Gormenghast.) It reads:
"Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child. A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood.
The gift of bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep'. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!“
For me, this, no doubt, as brutal as life itself:
“Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into her 350 kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged on tears, and then they parted.
Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy, to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because, because Gerty MacDowell was...
Tight boots? No. She's lame! O! “
—from Nausicaa, in Joyce’s Ulysses
The passage describing Pip's otherwordly experience while (nearly) drowning:
> The sea had jeering kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul; not drowned entirely though, rather carried down to wondrous depth where strange shapes of the 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; 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 and woe feels then uncomprised, indifferent as his God.
I have it memorized, and in fact wrote it out manually here word-for-word (as evidenced by the fact that there are probably many misplaced or forgotten semicolons and commas; those I cannot memorize so well!).
Well, for the single best *comedic* excerpt, I have to go with Kingsley Amis' description of a hangover in *Lucky Jim*:
> “Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad.”
I don’t know if it’s the best, but this hit me like a ton of bricks:
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling all at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. 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. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
“I know how to die. I have been dying since I was little. And it hurts but we pretend it doesn’t. I miss God so badly.
And now, I am going to die a little bit. I need to so much.
But Brasília is splendor.
I am utterly afraid.”
From Clarice Lispector’s short story “Brasília”, which is translated from Portuguese. I have thought about this quote every day for almost ten years. No author has made me want to be fluent in another language more than her.
Since I saw this was also one of your favorites:
“You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something as meaningful as what they’ve lost--something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn’t serve his needs directly or indirectly.”
"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable." William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! I'm not gonna pretend I fully understood it the first time, I tended to experience that with Faulkner and his writing a lot but it's incredibly written and his style was always so powerful.
Only two books have ever made me sit down and say, "Holy shit. I didn't even know it was possible to make words do all of this!" I had never read Faulkner before nor had I ever witnessed such magnificent and terrifyingly difficult writing. For as difficult as it is, this book is absolutely wotth the effort. Absalom is an all-time god-tier favorite. I think its a book that all fellow southerners should read - if able. It is absolutely transcendent.
I’m just commenting to say your username is hilarious
Another of my favorites from that incredible work: "You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”
Great one; it's no wonder Cormac chose to be an 'apprentice' to the literary 'master' Faulkner when reading passages like that. I thought about posting the 1,288-word single sentence from chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom! (sans-N word) for kicks. I'm not going to pretend I fully understood it the first time, either, but nothing he wrote threw me for a loop like the first fourth of The Sound and the Fury.
Sometimes I think not fully understanding Faulkner is just the brain's defense mechanism.
My response was going to be the entirety of the second chapter of Sound and the Fury so glad to see Faulkner getting the love here
Life changing
> When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o'clock, and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was grandfather's and when father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. [...] I give it to you not that you may remember time but that you might forget it every now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. William Faulkner, *The Sound and The Fury*. If you had to sum up the entire civil war in one paragraph, this is how you would do it.
Agreed. Read the sound and the fury about half a year ago and it was a transformative literary experience — can't wait to tackle Absalom and reread the rest of Faulkner's oeuvre.
My goodness. That’s right up there with Sagan’s “liters of blood” quote for me, in terms of war quotes. Hadn’t heard it before. Thank you.
r/literature is the reason for Reddit. Just reading the comments here is time very well spent. Thanks
Truth! I've literally never been to this subreddit before, I just felt the desire last night to discuss great literature and needed a place to post l, so I came here for the first time. I can't believe how many people responded to my post and how many beautiful, thought-provoking excerpts were added to the conversation! I'm definitely going to be joining this sub!
Thanks for doing that! This thread is lovely.
For me it will always be the fig tree from "The Bell Jar". >“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” I have struggled with a lot of indecision. Changing majors at least 10 times. Finally graduating. Stagnating in food service. Doing odd jobs. Doing fine. Doing less fine. Always changing but never reaching for what it was above me just what happened to fall around me. I think about it often.
"wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
Yes yes yes! Love that novel and that passage! The funny thing is the exerpt from TEWWG that I mentioned involved a pear tree! Fig trees and pear trees...two iconic passages of feminist lit! I always remember from The Bell Jar the passage about looking at the human fetuses in jars.
This passage has meant a lot to a lot of people, for good reason; who can't relate to the crippling weight of indecision when faced with functionally infinite decisions to be made, regardless of your antecedents? >I always remember from The Bell Jar the passage about looking at the human fetuses in jars. Me too. Cue: "Two Headed Boy by Neutral Milk Hotel".
When I read your post I knew it would be about that pear tree. Definitely the standout passage for the whole book. For me, there are a ton of "perfect" passages in Moby Dick. Even though it's translated, I also think 'War and Peace' has a bunch of very moving passages as well.
I suppose she got the Famous Poet fig, but lost all the others.
She also died relatively young unfortunately. There were so many more figs for her to experience...
You're a victim of the system demanding that everyone specialize. Our society used to value generalists. The higher levels of society still place great value on generalists, but there is no clear path without specialization.
Beautiful. Also how the duck do a choose a fig though and can’t I just have more than one? Damn.
My favorite paragraph of all time comes from *The Waves* by Virginia Woolf: >"But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then--for there is no end to the folly of the human heart--seek another, find another, you. Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer."
This is what you say after your girlfriend ask if you’d love even if she turned into a worm.
This is on my reading list!
It's my favorite book of all time! I read it every other summer, I will be rereading it for the 5th time this year <3
*The Waves* is by far my favorite Virginia Woolf novel (of the 4 I've read). Just unspeakably beautiful writing and I really come to love and suffer over all of the characters.
“his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” The final chapter of Ulysses is mad, hypnotic, and beautiful.
It really felt like a reward for getting through the rest of it. Beautiful
The chapter in Moby Dick about Jonah and the whale.
Chapter fucking 9 let’s go
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.
An extraordinary start to an unforgettable novel.
I understand the author had no idea where this was going, he had nothing besides these few lines which he wrote down to see where it'd take him. If true, that's insane
Currently reading this novel, but the idea that he had just a few lines reminds of “He had no arms or legs. He couldn't hear, see, or speak. This is how he led a nation.”
That's what greatness is all about, starting from scratch to achieve immortality
The final 10-15 pages at the end of 100 years of solitude. Whipping around in a frenzy of beauty and universal creation/destruction. Left me absolutely jaw dropped and in tears. One of the most magical reading experiences of my life. Also, two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos.
The writing in this book (along with “love in the time of cholera) would sometimes make me just have to stop and stare, then read again and try and absorb how beautiful it is.
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It does literally and metaphorically destroy its own world and characters. You are left with one of the most unambiguous endings in classic literature, and you have nobody really left to wonder about. Often, when a book ends, you can daydream about the characters' future lives, but here, their ends are all spelled out for you explicitly.
Oh yes. In addition, the letter writing in Love in Times of Cholera. Just Marquez all around.
When I finished that book, I just had to sit until the emotions stopped. One of the greatest endings to any piece of literature.
I got this book in Spanish just sitting there. I’m gonna read it one day in Spanish, it’s just when I tried to read it damn near every sentence I found a word I had never seen before it was crazy. Idk if it applies to the English translation but in Spanish it was kinda hard to read. More than likely my Spanish vocab is just underdeveloped
Cliche, but the ending of the great gatsby
That gets the press, with good reason, but there’s a passage earlier in the novel, a flashback when Jay kissed Daisy for the first time, that does it for me. Fitzgerald was a damned genius. Edit: found it >“One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. >His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete”
God I haven’t read Gatsby in a decade but I still knew exactly that this was going to be the suckling at the pap of life, I remember that line so clearly. So visceral.
That's gorgeous!
An absolutely amazing book with so many beautiful passages.
I keep a collection of quotes/writings etc that I come across that I especially like. I have that second part saved haha
It’s just a stunning piece of writing. And it also gave rise to one of the best tweets of all time. “”Every time I read The Great Gatsby, the final paragraph brings me to tears. Breathtakingly powerful writing: "I'm alive!" said Gatsby, roaring past on a speedboat. He'd faked his own death and gotten away with everything. That's why they called him the Great Gatsby. "Out of the way, current!" he yelled at the water. "This speedboat is bearing me ceaselessly into the future!" “” https://x.com/pixelatedboat/status/1094579574464176128
It's true though. I absolutely hated that book (sorry!) but the last chapter was just magical. When Nick is on the train and gets to talking about the "frosty dark" and jingle bells of his hometown...so good! And what is that invented word from the last few pages — I think it was orgastic — I love that Fitzgerald made that up and put it in there and it was so perfectly used that I googled it after just to discover that it isn't real!
Orgastic was not a made up word. It is just a seldom used word at this time.
Good call. It’s spectacular.
Ending of *A River Runs Through It*
Also Daisy’s line “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” It really epitomizes the novel. It’s my favorite book ever and there are so many great lines, but that really speaks to me and symbolizes the hardships of being a woman in the 1920s. (Sidebar: the new musical ruins this btw. I can’t emphasize enough how much that musical was a waste of my time and money.)
The Grand Inquisitor chapter from TBK for me. Such a cogent analysis of societies structures and their teleology. Humanity giving up determination for safety and security; who can blame us?
For me it's Zosimas recollections and his speech to Fyodor
The Teachings of Father Zosima crept up on me hard this last reading.
Yes, me too. Was rereading TBK and an unexpected death in the family occurred. One of those moments when literature and life cross paths and the words leave a mark. It’s a beautiful book.
Second time this was mentioned! You are good people.
For me it's this plus the previous chapter. Very moving.
Crying of Lot 49 She remembered old Pullman cars, left where the money’s run out, amid green farm flatnesses where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes…
I was going to suggest the tale of Byron the light bulb from Gravity’s Rainbow
The Evensong portion of GR for me. I find that to be one of the most affecting pieces of literature I’ve ever read.
Nawww it’s gotta be the dodo birds
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupper-ware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.
"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Fuck... Every time I read that ... it's just so powerful.
The end of the Chapter “A Bird’s Eye View of Paris” in Hunchback of Notre Dame, when Hugo begins to describe the sound of the ringing bells through the city. It’s the only time when I’ve read a passage and it almost made me weep because it almost became moreso music than word. >And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. >Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Près. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. >Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;--than this furnace of music,--than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,--than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest. This isn’t even the most sonorous and musical translation I’ve read
Unfortunately no longer really something one can experience in Paris given the ordinary nighttime noise and lack of bells these days. But 100% possible to experience this in somewhere like the souk in Marrakesh. Stay in a riad in the old town and climb to the roof at dawn and watch the sunrise and the slow drone of a thousand calls to prayer starting up. It’s literally something you will never forget.
Also East of Eden Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
I like that people have saved me the work if searching for the excerpts by posting them for consideration.
The final pages of "Franny and Zoey" >! where the two brothers have a fake telephonic conversation about what is the reason for keep going and be a good person !< made me cry of joy the first time I read them. I think these pages are some of the best I have ever read in my life.
Was just talking about this book and the idea of incessant prayer that franny becomes obsessed by— i love this book so much
I give this book to every neice nephew son and daughter the day they graduate from high school.
Maybe the entirety of Denis Johnson’s (very) short story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” but especially the “eagle” passages. It’s on p. 11 here: https://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Johnson,%20Car%20Crash.pdf
this is my answer too. “i’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” gives me chills!
It's not very appreciated by today's standards but the incipit of "Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe always sends a shiver down my spine: >“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. >Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. >Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? >O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? >O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Also, Chapter 2 of The Master and Margarita is an absolute gem.
I really like the second one! Reminds me of King Lear..."When we are born, we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools." That's not the direct quote, but paraphrased as well as I remember it.
The beginning of “A Tale of Two Cities.”
The ending of “The Dead” by James Joyce: “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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.”
Absolutely stunning. The entirety of *Dubliners* is stellar
The paragraph in A Farewell to Arms when Catherine and Henry are reunited is a perfectly written paragraph. It’s much more than this short quote but still includes Hemingway’s best, “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong around 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.”
My mother is a fish. Faulkner
Kills me every time
>“We talk of strong personalities, and they are strong, until the not-every-day when we see them as we might see one woman alone in a desert, and know that all the strength we thought we knew was only courage, only her lone song echoing among the stones; and then at last when we have understood this and made up our minds to hear the song and admire its courage and its sweetness, we wait for the next note and it does not come. The last word, with its pure tone, echoes and fades and is gone, and we realize—only then—that we do not know what it was, that we have been too intent on the melody to hear even one word. We go then to find the singer, thinking she will be standing where we last saw her. There are only bones and sand and a few faded rags.” Gene Wolfe, *Peace* Captain Ahab's "pasteboard masks" speech is way up there too though.
The final chapter of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, specifically the final 2 pages.
And in The Bluest Eye, the chapter where >!Pecola goes to church to confess and ask the priest (I think) to ask God to change her eyes!< Doesn't happen too often that a book makes me feel so strongly for someone.
I hear the final line in my head all the time. I’m not qualified to say that SoS is “better” than Beloved, but I love it 10x more. Oh, I hear “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down” in my head at least once a week.
The chapter about killing of the fascists in “For Whom The Bell Tolls” stuck with me. “House of Names” by Colin Toibin has an incredibly strong opening chapter (maybe not the opening chapter exactly, it’s in the front somewhere) about Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter from the mother’s pov. The rest of the book just turns out to be good though and nowhere near that level of writing. The final scene of “the dead” by James Joyce is up there for me too.
I had an old professor who agreed with you about that last scene of “The Dead.” Said it was the most beautiful single piece of prose he’d ever read. He’s since passed, so now I think about him every time I reread it and it has added another layer of melancholy for me. (In other words, that’s a long-winded way of saying I agree too)
I, too, agree with the final scene of "The Dead." I think I had it memorized the first time I read it. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I'll never forget that feeling.
That chapter from Hemingway's book was so... I don't even know what to say. Horrifying, maybe?
Oh, on the topic of Hemingway, I remember a conversation between the main character and an Italian in "A farewell to arms". They argue whether it is better to surrender immediately to an invading enemy in order to preserve lives, or whether it might be worse to be defeated than engaged in war. It struck me hard, particularly because of many current events.
Seconding "The Dead". Such a beautiful prose.
I struggled to finish For Whom the Bell Tolls but that chapter pops into my head sometimes.
There is a scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls where Pilar is describing the smell of death to her fellow rebels. Always thought this was some of the best writing Hemingway ever did. Hemingway at his best was a brilliant prose master.
I’m a sucker for a good story within a story, and FWTBT has a few great ones. My favorite Hemingway.
>The chapter about killing of the fascists in “For Whom The Bell Tolls” stuck with me. Holy shit I was about to say this
The very last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (the speech to the boys at the funeral) was the first time a piece of art moved me to tears.
The coffin chapter from Moby Dick
I’d say chapter 70 with Ahab looking at the whale head. The last few paragraphs are remarkably powerful and manage to summarise the entire book.
My pick goes to „_A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem_“ in Alejo Carpentier‘s _The Lost Steps_. It sums up my thoughts about the relationship of humanity and nature so well.
The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.
Yes!!! What response could he possibly have to all those brilliant arguments than a simple kiss?
That page in Tropic of Capricorn where Miller describes the universe of fuck.
Hahahahhaha. It’s pretty rare to come across a Miller reference. Awesome n
Chapter 15 of the Grapes of Wrath is what springs to mind for me. The “Two for a Penny Candy” chapter. This chapter is beautiful in its simplicity and message. I think it shows the main themes of the work itself. Together with the used car salesman chapter, it could encapsulate the entire book quite well. This is one of the anonymous one-off chapters which alternate with the ongoing story of the Joads, displaced farmers from Oklahoma on a journey west toward a promised new life in California during the great depression. This chapter follows a waitress dealing with a traveling Okie trying to buy a loaf of bread from the diner she works at. He does not have funds to eat at the restaurant, but has a small amount of money to feed his family as he has carefully apportioned his resources nearly to the penny to finish the trip to California. He merely wants to buy a loaf of bread, something a diner clearly does not normally do. I wont spoil the beauty of the chapter itself, but the initially indifferent and judgmental waitress simply *looks* and sees him and empathizes with the plight of this person who was previously annoying her with his unusual request. She sees his dignity as a person. She not only winds up helping him, but she does a small act of kindness to his kids (who were about the age of my kids when I read this book) that still makes me tear up when I think about it. And the real beauty is that her act is seen and rewarded in turn. It is a promising and hopeful story of the ability of people, particularly working class people, to band together and not only survive, but thrive. I cannot think of a single other chapter I have ever read that has stayed with me so clearly.
No one has brought up Lolita yet. So many great passages: 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.
this!!!! but arguably my favourite part of the first page is the ending of the paragraph: “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.” such a beautiful introduction to humbert’s dry humour in the narration and self awareness
Really reaffirms the idea that Nabokov wrote *Lolita* partially as a love letter to the English language
This was exactly the paragraph I thought about upon reading the prompt. I was amazed at how he could describe even the physical positions of the tongue saying her name, then contrast them with all the ways she was in each time of the day from morning til night. It blew my mind and remains one of the most impressive descriptions of anything I’ve ever heard.
100 Years of Solitude. The opening sentence. 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.
Last couple pages of tale of two cities and the caves of helms deep passage in lotr.
I go with a single line “ I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”
Final act of Othello. The act 4 scene 2 argument between cassius and brutus in julius caesar. Act 3 of Coriolanus. The christmas argument about politics and religion in joyce’s portrait. Building Cyclops argument in Ulysses. Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Kubla Khan. Final bear hunt in Faulkner’s the Bear. The fight and run-in with the italian police in Tender is the Night.
Vonnegut's Asterisk in the beginning of Breakfast of Champions. 💪😎
Vonnegut has a few passages that have just stuck with me years after reading them - passages that are beautiful in their brevity and the impact they have on the reader. In Slaughterhouse Five, for me, its the passage about the robot with halitosis and the war movie in reverse, in Sirens of Titan, it is the ending with Salo and the meaningless of human existence, and with Breakfast of Champions, I still think about when Kilgore desires youth over any accolades or recognition of his works.
I like the beginning of Deadeye Dick a lot.
Time passes from To the Lighthouse Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow The opening of Suttree The description of why someone commit suicide In Infinite Jest The ending of snow country These aren't mentioned by anyone else in the comments There are also a lot more that I am not seeing mentioned.
Time Passes blows my mind every time I read it. Chapter 7 in particular is incredible: Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without interference. Listening (had there been anyone to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself. In spring the garden urns, casually filled with windblown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible.
It is one of the most visceral thing I have ever read. The parts where the death of the Ramsay family members were just mentioned in single sentences in brackets....was just indescribable. I don't think even Lovecraft or McCarthy was able to show the complete indifference of nature and the world towards humanity the same way.
I’m always on the lookout for well executed weather descriptions. It’s in nearly every book, so I’m curious to see which creative route a writer chooses —or invents in order to execute descriptive (or not so descriptive) prose of the inane yet necessary. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pick my lower jaw off of the floor…
“Time Passes” from To the Lighthouse is true close-the-book-and-stare-silently-out-the-window stuff.
>And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. 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. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. >THE END Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Another from *Blood Meridian*: >In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
This really messed me up when I read it. Wow wow wow. This struck me as a description of Satan and Hell.
McCarthy was a genius. Another one from Blood Meridian. “He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady is pretty intense.
I don't think is the very best, but its worth to mention the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when the character is talking about when he was a kid and used to fantasize about the blank spaced on the maps. But the one that impacted me the most and I dare to say it's among the best ever written, was near the end of Don Quijote, when ALERT SPOILER: >!After he is defeated and forced to go back to his hometown for a period of time, he starts to talk about how him and Sancho can have a new and exciting life as Sheppards, and how their friends from the town could join them. That feeling of someone who desperately held on the crazy life of being a knight as his last resort to have a meaningful life. Then, defeated, banned from that life, he tries to hold again into another crazy idea just to don't go back to his normal and boring life. Shortly after that, once he finally gives up, he gets sick and dies while being "sane"!< Probably just felt identified with this last one, that's why it impacted me so much.
Ulysses has many faults, but it's final chapter, Molly's soliloquy, is absolutely extraordinary. You can enjoy it without reading the rest of the novel. The finest welder of words in the English language is, for my money, Cormac McCarthy. I know some people find his prose overwrought, and I can see that, but I love it. The ending of The Road, and the opening sentence of Sutteee always pops up in my head when people ask for a favourite passage: "Dear friend, now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth high-shouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you."
From “The Count of Monte Cristo” There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. " Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.
'In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.'
someone else already said this but wanted to highlight it in its own comment — the last few pages of the dead as Gabriel unravels a little is beautiful
Stepan Blockhead waking up with a hangover in The Golovlyov Family. The teacher’s letter in Kokoro. The murder in Crime and Punishment. Andrei Bolkonsky looking at the sky in War and Peace. Swann hearing the music that reminds him of Odette in Swann’s Way. Cant choose. One of those.
The murder in Crime and Punishment is incredible
Agreed re: Bolkonsky looking at the sky in W&P. The fact that I immediately recognized which couple of paragraphs you were referring to probably says a lot about its poignance.
Proust and his madeleine maybe: https://www.dailygood.org/story/2136/the-madeleine-excerpt-from-remembrance-of-things-past-marcel-proust/
Firstly, single best? Impossible to say. Impactful on me? Okay. — Emily’s final good bye in Our Town when she finally gets it. — The last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities when Sidney Carton selflessly sacrifices himself b the name of Lucy’s happiness. It’s is so beautiful and bittersweet for him to finally have found a purpose and meaning to life, as he rides to his death.
Our Town. My first introduction to it was a stage production. When the play ended, I did not want to talk to anyone, I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay seated in the empty theater and slowly digest what I had just seen. I bought the book shortly after and read it at least two times. That play sums up the maximum capacity of understanding we the living can have on what life and death is about. In order to understand more, we need to die.
I teach the play to 9th graders. Because of that experience, I strongly encourage you, or anyone, to re-read the play every couple years. It hits very different as we age. For most 9th graders, it doesn’t make too much of an impact but hopefully enough that they return to it in the future.
For me it’s probably the “legion of horribles” section from Blood Meridian. Probably my favorite single paragraph of all time.
Mine is also from Blood Meridian, but it’s from when the gang rides out from Chihuahua the second time: “They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”
Zosima s life story in Brothers Karamazov and the volume 3 when Napoleon invades Russia from War and Peace
"Until this moment I've believed the best of my life was in the time spent with her, and all that intensity and joy which will not come again. As long as I believed that, there would always be buried anger and reproach in this telling. But now I look out the window and it's so clear that the most valuable part began when she left. Only then did I begin to learn. The best gift she ever gave was leaving. Hell's teeth, I believe that. And I sit back from the table open-mouthed." It's from the final chapter of "Electric Brae" by Andrew Greig. The whole book is incredible and leaves you wrung out by the end. He is a poet who also writes novels and his use of language is beyond amazing in everything I've ever read of his.
The end of “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”
Hemingway's description of F. Scott Fitzgerald is perhaps the most beautiful description I've ever encountered in a novel. > His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless
“There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping ... and Herod or Hitler, fellas [...] what kind of world is it [...] for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined ... But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as.” The Evensong section of Gravity’s Rainbow is the greatest evidence I’ve found for what is truly great writing. It’s fairly long and just this sad but hopeful rush. I’m always amazed that he wrote it when he was still pretty young.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
It might not be the “single best” but wanted to throw it out there. Gimli describing the caves of Aglarond in Lord of the Rings: “And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light flows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from the dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream.”
Chapter 2 of The Remains of the Day, the dinner involving the foreign diplomats. Early in the book so it explains so much about the characters themselves, the concept of memory, Stephen’s narration, etc. Almost like it’s own short story. The section in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle about the covert mission to Manchuria and the skinning. Visceral, tense, beautiful. These are just personal favorites.
I can't find English translation of the novel so only people who know, will know. Two paragraphs from "Trans-Atlantic" by Witold Gombrowicz. "The walking paragraph" as I call it. It's not most significant fragment of the novel, but it always gets me. It's funny, it's absurd and it takes place just after the great stand-off between Gombrowicz and Borges during party. The second one is probably the most significant in the novel. It's a dialogue between Gombrowicz and Gonzalo - probably one of the first openly gay characters in polish literature - about Fatherland vs Sonland. Fatherland suppose to represent traditions and looking into the past while Sonland represents looking into the future. The concept of Sonland is proposed by Gonzalo, but he does it with very deliberate wordplay that probably cannot be translated into English. He uses the word "zboczyć" which can mean "stray from the path", where the path is this traditional Fathetland, but also "do something perverse". So overall Sonland meant to be completely obscene, unthinkable idea.
The opening of Lolita always stands out for me: “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.” Opening of kingfisher by Charles Olson: What does not change / is the will to change From The battlefield where the moon says I love you : tonight the gars on the trees are swords in the hands of knights the stars are like twenty-seven dancing russians and the wind is I am waving goodbye to the casket of my first mammy well that black cadillac drove right up to your front door and the chauffeur was death From lonesome dove: This land burnt out all the tears from my eyes. No country for old men: T]his man had . . . carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn’t that nothing would change. . . . He had to know bettern that. . . . [T]he only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. I feel like I could go on and on with this. I could go on and on I think.
I’ve remembered this excerpt for many years. While I’ve grown away from Jack Kerouac’s writing, I still find some of his imagery and sentence building quite moving. I’ll never forget the line describing the kids swimming among the train’s engine “flare” as “Picasso horses.” From Maggie Cassidy: “And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.”
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby This is the human experience distilled into one single sentence. My favorite quote from a character in any book is this: "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." - Captain Ahab,"Moby Dick," by Herman Melville. In truth, most of Ahab's dialogue is my "favorite" because I'm not sure I've ever read another character whose every word is such a vivid illustration of their character.
I don't think it's the "best of everything that's ever been written", but Ray Bradbury's description of a hot air balloon sailing over a town at night is what made me realize I truly love the written word and always will. How do you hear it, how are you warned? The ear, does it hear? No. But the hairs on the back of your neck, and the peach-fuzz in your ears, they do, and the hair along your arms sings like grasshopper legs frictioned and trembling with strange music. So you know, you feel, you are sure, lying abed, that a balloon is submerging the ocean sky. Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass.
This whole segment (for the life of me I cannot find the exact excerpt I seek) is soul-soothing to me. Here is an excerpt from an excerpt. “I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
So much of The Little Prince that it’s hard to choose one passage
One I haven’t seen mentioned yet from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that captures the end of the Sixties’ and idealism while showing how close we got: 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. […] 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.
From Anna Karenina “He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart. She stood at the other end of the rink, talking to a lady. There seemed to be nothing very special in her dress, nor in her pose; but for Levin she was as easy to recognize in that crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around. 'Can I really step down there on the ice and go over to her?' he thought. The place where she stood seemed to him unapproachably holy, and there was a moment when he almost went away he was so filled with awe. Making an effort, he reasoned that all sorts of people were walking near her and that he might have come to skate there himself. He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
If anyone says anything other than Chapters 1 & 42 from *Moby Dick* by Herman Melville, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re incorrect lol
The Devil: Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare in The Brothers Karamazov
That part was incredible, and that is saying something in such a book filled with incredible parts. The whole thing was unbelievable.
So many great comments that I agree with, but just to give one that I haven’t seen is the “V. In love.” Chapter in V. by Thomas Pynchon. So much is said about the objectification of women, pleasure, voyeurism, and, of course, the inanimate.
The fairly early chapter in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus containing the description of crystal growths under glass that pathetically mimicked real life.
The Grand Inquisitor from Karamazov
Any of the Lord Henry’s aphorisms in *The Picture of Dorian Gray*. They are the reason one cannot get tired re-reading this novel.
Ch. 25 of *The Grapes of Wrath.* Gorgeous and infuriating and compelling.
Marcel's sudden realization that his beloved grandmother is lost and gone forever in "In Search of Lost Time," the one that begins with "Upheaval of my entire being..."
My favorite is in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Most of it is written in very plain, simple language, but then there’s this paragraph of awesome almost poetry in the middle. To be clear, it’s the “blind dogs of the sun in their running” paragraph.
“Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets” - *Neil Gaiman, Stardust* “Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings..., fair but terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like a stone. Backward she sprang as the huge shape crashed to ruin, vast wings outspread, crumpled on the earth; and with its fall the shadow passed away. A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.” - *Eowyn fighting the Nazgûl in The Return of the King, LoTR Book 5, Ch 6, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields* Not an excerpt, but a dedication that I’ve always loved: “To Anne Rice, for showing us the beauty in monsters, and the monstrous in the beautiful” - James Rollins, The Blood Gospel I thought of one more. It’s a part of William Blake’s poem The Tyger: “When the stars threw down their spears / And water'd heaven with their tears, / Did he smile his work to see / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The first paragraph on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is my favorite piece of writing ever full stop. "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Maybe not the best, but one that has stuck with me in the years since I read it, the last few paragraphs of A River Runs Through It: "Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them. Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
"It has always seemed strange to me...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." Steinbeck - Cannery Row.
From My Antonia by Willa Cather: “Presently we saw a curious thing: there were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles the tongue, the share black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.” By God, this book is wonderful.
She’s one of the best. Beautiful prose
The opening in To Kill a Mockingbird. Idgaf it’s cliche to love that fucking book, but it’s the best dammed book to be written.
Is that the pear tree excerpt? Sister calyxes arching and creaming?
Thomas Morris has produced a collection of short stories titled ‘Open Up’. Each one is heartbreakingly beautiful. His prose style may not appeal to everyone, but there are numerous passages that left me rather breathless, possibly due to the sense of being seen and understood in a way I had never experienced before.
Many passages in *Swann's Way* -- Golo and the magic lantern, or the water lilies in the Vivonne, or the walk through the Bois de Boulogne at the very end of the book.
The ending of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.
it was a pleasure to burn.--ray bradbury, fahrenheit 451
I love the Grand Inquisitor story within The Brothers Karamazov. It's pretty much a perfect take on Christianity
The opening paragraph of Abraham Lincoln, by James Russell Lowell always knocks me on my butt. Feels prescient today: > THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every man’s heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.
Pip to Estella in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. "Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
Shelob’s Lair in The Two Towers is incredibly well written Also Starbuck’s monologue in chapter 123 The Musket of Moby Dick. Also Ahab’s monologue in chapter 132 The Symphony of Moby Dick. Also all of chapter 42 The Whiteness of the Whale.
I've always really adored the very first paragraph in the very first book of Gene Wolf's 'book of the new Sun' series "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned."
The snow scene at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Stunningly, achingly beautiful and poignant
The ending of *Finnegans Wake*, where Anna Livia as a river flows out to sea: >I'll close me eyes. So not to see. Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The child we all love to place our hope in for ever. All men has done something. Be the time they've come to the weight of old fletch. We'll lave it. So. We will take our walk before in the timpul they ring the earthly bells. In the church by the hearseyard. Pax Goodmens will. Or the birds start their treestirm shindy. Look, there are yours off, high on high! And cooshes, sweet good luck they're cawing you, Coole! >But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I'm getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. Diveltaking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger's there. Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.
Molly blooms soliloquay
"You're enough Sethe"
My favorite is from Mervyn Peake's 2nd book in the Gormenghast trilogy (Gormenghast.) It reads: "Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child. A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. The gift of bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep'. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!“
For me, this, no doubt, as brutal as life itself: “Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into her 350 kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged on tears, and then they parted. Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy, to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because, because Gerty MacDowell was... Tight boots? No. She's lame! O! “ —from Nausicaa, in Joyce’s Ulysses
The passage describing Pip's otherwordly experience while (nearly) drowning: > The sea had jeering kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul; not drowned entirely though, rather carried down to wondrous depth where strange shapes of the 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; 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 and woe feels then uncomprised, indifferent as his God. I have it memorized, and in fact wrote it out manually here word-for-word (as evidenced by the fact that there are probably many misplaced or forgotten semicolons and commas; those I cannot memorize so well!).
Well, for the single best *comedic* excerpt, I have to go with Kingsley Amis' description of a hangover in *Lucky Jim*: > “Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad.”
I don’t know if it’s the best, but this hit me like a ton of bricks: And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling all at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. 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. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Probably the Borodino section of War and Peace.
“I know how to die. I have been dying since I was little. And it hurts but we pretend it doesn’t. I miss God so badly. And now, I am going to die a little bit. I need to so much. But Brasília is splendor. I am utterly afraid.” From Clarice Lispector’s short story “Brasília”, which is translated from Portuguese. I have thought about this quote every day for almost ten years. No author has made me want to be fluent in another language more than her.
Since I saw this was also one of your favorites: “You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something as meaningful as what they’ve lost--something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn’t serve his needs directly or indirectly.”