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Favorite Passages

post #1 of 33
3/25/06 at 7:50pm
Thread Starter 
You don't have to quote the whole thing, but what are some of your favorite lines or pieces of books/literature, either fiction or non-fiction? In the interests of discussion, let's also talk about why.

Quote:
From The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy:
Before I reached the door, I heard him say, "One last thing, McLean. Do you ever think about your place in history? What do you think will be your place in the history of the Institute. I already know my place. But what about yours? Tell me about your place in the history of the school."

He was laughing at me, mocking me, and I turned, loathing every single thing he stood for on earth.

"General", I said, "I want you to hear this and I want you to think about it."

"What do you have to say, McLean?"

"I plan to write that history, sir."
I read this book for the first time in high school and it remains one of my favorites. This passage is a big part of that--as a lower middle class student at an exclusive prep school, it was hard not identify with Will McLean. It's also one of my favorite "Fuck yous" I've read--McLean is basically saying that history may be written by the victors, but there will always be writers who are going to tell the truth--and as a struggling writer, that still resonates with me today.
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post #2 of 33
3/25/06 at 10:05pm
Quote:
Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had.
First line of Lost Horizon. Sets the tone perfectly, without giving away anything of where the story is going to go. Another thing I like about the book is how the narrator's voice is handed on from one person's recollections to the next, burying us deeper and deeper in the fantasy.
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post #3 of 33
3/26/06 at 3:03am
"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.

On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again."

Last passage in The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. It's a little piece of prose poetry that raises the hardboiled detective novel into the realm of American literature. Killed me the first time I read it, and every time after that...
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post #4 of 33
3/26/06 at 3:35am
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

--T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

My favorite part of the poem that flung wide the doors of literature for yours truly.
===
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

This captures the way I felt the first time I saw a dead man. Not viewing-room, makeup and dark suit dead, but dead on the ground dead. Religion's a wonderful thing, but there's no getting around the hard, cold slap of death. Heller may have been a one-hit wonder, but what a hit.
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post #5 of 33
3/26/06 at 4:17am
I feel a little bad what with everyone so far putting down passages from these really great works when one of my favorites is from a pretty pedestrian source. It's my sig, which is from Unknown Man #89 by Elmore Leonard. This'll probably get someone to reply with a "You should read more," but he's my favorite author. I think the passage below tells a lot about who Jack Ryan is, and I've always tried to live by it. Just take things as they come, and try not to sweat the bullshit that doesn't really matter.
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post #6 of 33
3/26/06 at 8:18am
Quote:
“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” - Ecclesiastes
Regardless of your feelings toward religion it cannot be denied that there's some beautiful stuff written in the Bible. The above truism – that fools and crooks would have you believe otherwise - is as good a life lesson as you’ll find.

… and here’s the best contemporary spin on it:

Quote:
“Logic! The world cries for logic. I have none, yet here I am, formed as a man with mind heart and vitals, yet formed by a chance coming together of certain elements. The world needs logic. Yet all the logic in the world is worth as much as one lucky guess. Men take pains to weave a web of careful thoughts – yet others thoughtlessly weave a random pattern and achieve the same result.” -- Elric by Michael Moorcock
Quote:
'Now that this treasure … could ensure the future happiness of him whom Faria really loved as a son, it had doubled its value in his eyes, and every day he expatiated on the amount, explained to Dantes all the good which, with thirteen or fourteen millions of francs, a man could do these days to his friends; and then Dantes … reflected how much ill, in these times, a man with thirteen or fourteen millions could do to his enemies.' – The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I love this passage. Edmond Dantes’ terrifying bitterness and hatred is juxtaposed beautifully with the wisdom and kindness of Abbé Faria.

Quote:
'As the natives of Arabia and India were contented with the productions and manufactures of their own country, silver, on the side of the Romans, was the principal, if not the only instrument of commerce. It was a complaint worthy of the gravity of the senate, that, in the purchase of female ornaments, the wealth of the state was irrecoverably given away to foreign and hostile nations. The annual loss is computed, by a writer of an inquisitive but censorious temper, at upwards of eight hundred thousand pounds sterling. Such was the style of discontent, brooding over the dark prospect of approaching poverty.' -– The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.
I could pick three-score-and-ten Gibbon quotes. He was a funny, funny man. The thought of august and wise Roman senators tearing their hair out over their wives’ spending habits confirms what I’ve always suspected: Women have had us by the bollocks since the dawn of man.

Quote:
'During the interval [of the play], one of the talkative bores [a critic] remarked to him [Candide], ‘You should not have wept. That actress is wretched, and the actor who plays with her is even worse. The piece is worse than the actors. The author does not know a word of Arabic, yet he has laid his scene in Arabia. What is more, the fellow does not believe in innate ideas. Tomorrow I will bring you a score of pamphlets that have been written against him.'-– Candide by Voltaire
Voltaire was a smart man. And funny, too. The above perfectly illustrates the reasons for my opinion of many critics.

Quote:
He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs spotted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the centre of the field was a gigantic pile of sets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten-ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier’s “Sargasso Sea.” Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination! And the dream dump grew continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint. Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot. -– The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
One of the best comments on the movie business in arguably the best book about the movie business.

Quote:
'All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when ever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you: digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.' –- Watership Down by Richard Adams
One of the most memorable and stirring calls for survival I’ve seen, in an ironically humane book.

Quote:
'There was only one question in his mind to which he had not yet worked out an answer. It had to do with a contingency he was not prepared to meet. When he first volunteered for the program, they had told him very openly and honestly that the medical problems were complex and not fully understood. They would have to learn how to deal with some of them on him. It was possible that some of the answers would be hard to find or wrong. It was possible that returning him to his old shape would be, well, difficult. They told him that very clearly and at the very beginning, and they never said it again.

But he remembered. The problem he had not resolved was what he would do if for any reason, when the whole mission was over, they could not put him back together right away. What he couldn’t decide was whether he would then simply kill himself or, at the same time, kill as many as possible of his friends, superiors and colleagues as well.' – Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
A superb SF story about human experimentation takes a much unexpected turn into blackness.
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post #7 of 33
3/26/06 at 11:08am
Quote:
"Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry and war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last."

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
I've always loved that simply because of the utter despair that precedes it, and then the simple ray of hope from something so mundane as a rooster crowing at the dawn, magnified into the horns of the Rohirrim.

Quote:
"They gazed at God's Final Message to His Creation in wonderment, and were slowly and ineffably filled with a great sense of peace, and of final and complete understanding.

Fenchurch sighed. 'Yes,' she said, 'that was it.'

They had been staring at it for fully ten minutes before they became aware that Marvin, hanging between their shoulders, was in difficulties. The robot could no longer lift his head, had not read the message. They lifted his head, but he complained that his vision circuits had almost gone.

They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He complained and insulted them, but they helped him look at each individual letter in turn. The first letter was a 'w,' the second an 'e.' Then there was a gap. An 'a' followed, then a 'p,' an 'o,' and an 'l.'

Marvin paused for a rest.

After a few moments they resumed and let him see the 'o,' the 'g,' the 'i,' the 'z,' and the 'e.'

The next two words were 'for' and 'the.' The last one was a long one, and Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.

It started with 'i,' then 'n,' then 'c.' Next came an 'o' and an 'n,' followed by a 'v,' an 'e,' another 'n,' and an 'i.'

After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength for the last stretch.

He read the 'e,' the 'n,' the 'c,' and at last the final 'e,' and staggered back into their arms.

'I think,' he murmured at last from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax, 'I feel good about it.'

The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.

Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could rent scooters from guys with green wings."

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Douglas Adams.
The Final Message is a good joke, and Marvin's reaction an even better one, and I have to admit I got a little misty when the old bucket of bolts kicked it.
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post #8 of 33
3/26/06 at 12:02pm
There's nothing wrong with Elmore Leonard.
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post #9 of 33
3/26/06 at 6:56pm
Damn it, Dickson, I knew exactly what I was going to contribute when I saw the thread, and there it is in your post.

God, I miss Adams.
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post #10 of 33
3/26/06 at 7:29pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
From American Tabloid by James Ellroy:

The roar did a long slow fade. He braced himself for this big fucking scream.
Still one of my favorite endings out there. I love how Ellroy sums up everything that came after Kennedy's assassination with that single, final sentence.
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post #11 of 33
3/26/06 at 7:58pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nigel St. Buggering
Damn it, Dickson, I knew exactly what I was going to contribute when I saw the thread, and there it is in your post.

God, I miss Adams.
It's the one passage from Hitchhiker's that really sticks with me. I especially love the little bit of whimsy at the end, it's one of the things that always stood out in his writing.

Seriously, after reading this, I was a little disappointed to see Mostly Harmless coming out. So Long was the perfect ending for the series.
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post #12 of 33
3/26/06 at 9:00pm
It's true to say that I've found Melville's Moby Dick a difficult read, but there was this one passage where Ahab contemplates the head of a dead whale that really leapt off the page for me.

Quote:
Speak, thou vast and venerable head, muttered Ahab, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed --while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!
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post #13 of 33
3/27/06 at 1:11am
My recent favorite has been Walter Mosely. There's at least one great line or turn of phrase on every page.
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post #14 of 33
3/27/06 at 1:59am
A couple from Kent Anderson's Night Dogs:

Quote:
The patrolmen who worked out of North, the street cops, asked to be assigned there because the Avenue was where the crime was, and they liked the work. They were the troublemakers, hot dogs, bad boys, adrenaline junkies back from Vietnam, overtime specialists making sixty grand a year. "Supercops" with comething to prove, afraid they were queer or cowards. True believers, racists, sadists, manic-depressives using adrenaline and exhaustion to keep their demons at bay. All seemed sane as long as they walked the streets with a gun-most of them good cops.

Quote:
He took his beer into the front room of the old farmhouse, walking past the big easy chair and the woodstove to the bookcase against the far wall, where he pulled Mr. Thorgaard's book, Steam, off the shelf and thumbed through it as he had done maybe a hundred times sine that day he'd found it in the dead man's bedroom. The leather-bound volume of flowchart, mathematical tables, air/fuel efficiency formulas, graphs and steam-return blueprints seemed self-contained and conclusive-Water+Fire=Steam=Energy. He'd read it front to back. From the last page, backwards, to page one. Opened it at random. He'd tried leapfrogging through the pages in multiples of two, four, eight, searching for a pattern. Sometimes he's purposefully blurred his vision, looking for words or images hidden within the etchings or power plants, steamships playing the Great Lakes, the panoramas of disaster-the crosshatched black guts of ruptured boilers buried beneath splintered timbers and the rubble of chimneys-hoping to penetrate the fundamental mysteries of fire and water, and find within them instructions for living honourably in the midst of madness and brutality, a diagram or formula that would show him a way to walk, with courage and mercy, through a world where sometimes, late at night when it was very quiet, he thought he could hear pain itself rising from the earth to ride the dark, apple-scented air.
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post #15 of 33
3/27/06 at 5:23am
Nope, he was a lifer in the bartending trade. He knew that, and as of that particular weekday afternoon -- he figured it was something like two years ago, though he hadn't marked the date on his calendar-- he'd known he wasn't going to be a great success at it, either. The thought, which he'd instantly recognized as wholly true, had depressed him at first, and that evening he drank a little more than he usually did, and the next morning he felt a little crummier than usual, and took three aspirins instead of two, plus an Excedrin to keep them company.
By the time the hangover was gone, so was the depression. The fact of the matter was that he'd never really wanted to get any place. He just thought he ought to want to, like everybody else. But he didn't. His life was fine just the way it was. He never had to work too hard, he never worried much, and he got by. There were things he'd never have or do or be, but that was true for everybody. You could be the richest, most successful man on the planet and there'd always be one woman who wouldn't love you back, one mountain you couldn't climb, one thing you wanted to buy that nobody would sell to you.

He had a good life.

[Lawrence Block, "Small Town"]

There are so many quotes and passages from the Scudder novels that I can't remember clear.
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post #16 of 33
3/27/06 at 5:25am
But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its grey rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape."
James Lee Burke
Lay Down My Sword And Shield
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post #17 of 33
3/27/06 at 6:45am
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood 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."
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Never, ever fails to give me goosebumps.
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post #18 of 33
3/27/06 at 1:59pm
My all time personal fav has got to be:

"The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire -- one mean mama -- three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste."
Across the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks by Joe R. Lansdale
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post #19 of 33
3/27/06 at 2:08pm
Favorite: Northwest

Least favorite: The Middle
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post #20 of 33
3/27/06 at 7:13pm
"It was a dark and stormy galaxy. Some called it the Milky Way but for others the way was clear. Prophets called these with truest vision "heroes", and that they were, but not heroes in the traditional sense, that of being a normal, healthy, God-fearing and authority-respecting American; but in the real sense, that of being an actual hero, one that does heroic things with reckless disregard for his own safety."

And

"Our macroshuttle was granted tempora-permission to land for refuelination under the strict understanding we'd have sex with their women and be on our way. Of course it wasn't so simple, as we had to first submit countless tomes of nude depictions of ourselves and provide electro-proof we had intoxicating tinctures onboard. Also we had to submit genetic affidavits that we intended to use said intoxicants, as well as perform the acts shown in the illumi-photos of ourselves."

Chapters 1 and 26, respectively, of Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure by Stephen Colbert.

(Someone had to)
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post #21 of 33
4/28/06 at 8:25pm
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

No matter how many times I read it, it remains fresh and beautiful.
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post #22 of 33
4/28/06 at 9:00pm
Quote:
They could not get over the long upward tilt of the camera, through the machinery and shadows of the opera house, to the pair of stagehands holding their noses while Susan Alexander made her debut. They would never forget the way the camera had dived through the sky-light of the seedy nightclub to pounce on poor Susie in her ruin. They discussed the interlocking pieces of the jigsaw portrait of Kane, and argued about how anyone knew his dying word when no one appeared to be in the room to hear him whisper it. Joe struggled to express, to formulate, the revolution in his ambitions for the ragged-edged and stapled little art form to which their inclinations and luck had brought them. It was not just a matter, he told Sammy, of somehow adapting the bag of cinematic tricks so boldly displayed in the movie...It was that Citizen Kane represented, more than any other movie Joe had ever seen, the total blending of narration and image that was - didn't Sammy see it? - the fundamental principle of comic book storytelling, and the irreducible nut of their partnership. Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and bold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was more, much more than any movie really needed to be.
I once had a friend ask me why I liked Citizen Kane so much. He was one of those "Sure it's a classic, but it's boring as hell"-folks, and I couldn't accurately describe how I felt about it. I came upon this while reading THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, and immediately emailed this passage to him. Chabon so distinctly gets the feeling of falling in love with a movie, that I couldn't help but use it as a descriptor. There's a near-tangible feeling of excitement and artistic passion in this section of the book (going beyond just this passage), which should be immediately relatable to anyone reading this website.
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post #23 of 33
4/28/06 at 9:55pm
From the Wind in the Willows:

Quote:
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the panpipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived, and still, as he lived, he wondered.
A little overripe maybe, but I like it that way.
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post #24 of 33
4/28/06 at 11:00pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shane
I once had a friend ask me why I liked Citizen Kane so much. He was one of those "Sure it's a classic, but it's boring as hell"-folks, and I couldn't accurately describe how I felt about it. I came upon this while reading THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, and immediately emailed this passage to him. Chabon so distinctly gets the feeling of falling in love with a movie, that I couldn't help but use it as a descriptor. There's a near-tangible feeling of excitement and artistic passion in this section of the book (going beyond just this passage), which should be immediately relatable to anyone reading this website.
Thank you. That's one of my favorites. But you forgot the punchline--when Joe turns to Sammy and says "I want to do something like that."
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post #25 of 33
4/28/06 at 11:12pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cameron Hughes
There are so many quotes and passages from the Scudder novels that I can't remember clear.
Here's a couple of my favorites:

Quote:
They don't run to type, these friends of mine, not as far as I can see. By and large they wouldn't have much fondness for one another. But they are my friends. I don't judge them, or the friendships I have with them. I can't afford to. --From Everybody Dies (Chapter 3)
This is one of the later Scudders, after he's had time to find his "family," and a large part of the novel is about his relationship with them, especially when one member comes under attack. Despite this, Scudder seems to be able to draw all his family members together to protect the one--although some never meet him. I think Block makes a great point here when it comes to building a family out of your friends and lovers--they don't all have to get along, but you need them. That's what family is.

Quote:
Do you know, I think New Yorkers are like those rabbits. We live here for whatever it is that the city provides--the culture, the job opportunities, whatever it is. And we look the other way as the city kills off our friends and neighbors. Oh, we read about it and we talk about it for a day or two days but then we blink it all away. Because otherwise we'd have to do something about it, and we can't. Or we'd have to move, and we don't want to move. We're like those rabbits, aren't we?--From Eight Million Ways To Die (Chapter 18)
As someone who lived in New York for three years, as someone who still has friends living here, this is one that I really identify with. Block is writing from the perspective of someone who's living in the bleak late 20th century days of New York, but his description of the city as a killer still resonates today. I love his usasge of "blink," because time is measured so quickly here--i.e., New York minute, etc.

Quote:
What does happen, if you're lucky, is that the word gets around. There may be eight million people in the goddamn city but it's amazing how they all talk to each other.--From Eight Million Ways To Die (Chapter 20)
I just love this, too, because it's true.
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post #26 of 33
4/28/06 at 11:22pm
Quote:
"I hear him!" cried Janice.

"What does he say?"

The voice called out from Mars and took itself through the places where there was no sunrise or sunset, but always the night with a sun in the middle of the blackness. And somewhere between Mars and Earth everything of the message was lost, perhaps in a sweep of electrical gravity rushing by on the floodtides of a meteor, or interfered with by a rain of silver meteors. In any event, the small words and the unimportant words of the message were washed away. And his voice came through saying only one word:

"...love..."

After that, there was the huge night again and the sound of stars turning and suns whispering to themselves and the sound of her own heart, like another world in space, filling her earphones.
From "The Wilderness", in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Anybody in a long-distance relationship can relate.
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post #27 of 33
2/1/09 at 12:56pm
Hammerhead linked to this thread in the Current Reading, and I want to bump it. I've been reading Sherlock Holmes, and at least in the early stories, the two men are using observation as a way to deal with depression. Watson is an Afghan vet recovering from his wounds, Holmes may have an addiction:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sherlock Holmes
Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth. -- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
Which reminds me of the Eliot poem quoted upthread, and the last line of 100 Years of Solitude.

The bad guys in the first Sherlock Holmes book are Mormons.
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post #28 of 33
2/1/09 at 4:22pm
From Positively Fifth Street by James McManus:
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Having chosen Sandy as his consort in the spring of '95, Ted never had a chance to get better. The acute psychic masochism shared and nurtured by Sandy got him permanently banned from the Horseshoe and strung out worse than ever, cuckolded and burked on the floor his den, burglarized twice in the bargain. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, was eventually able to kick his self-destructive roulette habit, but only after his true-blood second wife let him get it all out of his system. Anna also made him a father for the first time at age forty-seven, and surely that enhanced her salutary influence. But before that she went so far as to grant him permission to pawn their winter coats and wedding rings - on their honeymoon, no less! - to enable him to play more roulette. My nature requires this, he'd pleaded to her. This is how I'm made! Anna knew what she'd let herself in for. They'd become engaged only after she took down in shorthand his frenzied dictation of The Gambler in twenty-seven days to meet a deadline, and by succeeding earned three thousand rubles. Had he failed - had they failed - by even one minute, Fyodor Mikhailovich would have forfeited the royalties not only on The Gambler but on all of his books to his viciously opportunistic publisher. Talk about a gamble! Talk about going all-in! (And talk about "enabling" behavior on Anna's part.) Yet Dostoyevsky lived for contests like these. For him, gambling and genius and Russianness and love were gorgeously braided together, like Anna Grigoryevna's brown hair. To take risks, challenge fate, was an act of high poetry. Once I hear the clatter of the chips, he desperately explained to her once, I almost go into convulsions. Hear, hear! But even in Bad Jim's most out-of-control fantasia, pawning winter coats would never occur to him. Wedding rings, maybe. Not coats.
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post #29 of 33
2/14/09 at 11:37pm
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And you would know the answers to all the questions without being told. Did she ever write that five-page paper about the guy who lost his nose? Did she ask Mark to marry her again? Did she stop sleeping with people who had titles instead of names? Did she walk 1,638 miles? Did she get to work and become the Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant Writer? You'd believe the answers to all these to be yes. I would have given you what you wanted then: to be a witness to healing. But this isn't a fiction. Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about. Sometimes you wake up and find that you actually have lost your nose. Losing my mother's wedding ring in the Tongue River was not OK. I did not feel better for it. It was not a passing or a release. What happened is that I lost my mother's wedding ring and I understood that I was not going to get it back, that it would be yet another piece of my mother that I would not have for all the days of my life, and I understood that I could not bear this truth, but that I would have to. Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do. It's what I did then and there. I stood up and got into my truck and drove away from a part of my mother. The part of her that had been my lover, my wife, my first love, my true love, the love of my life.
This is the last passage in Cheryl Strayed's essay, "The Love of My Life," about the downward spiral her life took after the death of her mother. It's the first thing I ever read that made me weep.
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post #30 of 33
2/15/09 at 3:41am
Here's three favorites of mine...

From "The Last Question", by Asimov.

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"Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light----
From Hogfather, Tery Pratchett

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"All right," said Susan, "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meet the rising ape.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"
Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice. Duty. Mercy. That sort of thing.
"They're not the same at all!"
Really? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged:
"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"
My point exactly.
Finally, "The Road", Cormac McCarthy

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should have been more careful, he said.
The boy didn't answer.
You have to talk to me.
Okay.
You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
I would had added "Valerie's Letter" from "V for Vendetta", but graphic novels dont count, i guess.
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post #31 of 33
2/15/09 at 12:17pm
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Originally Posted by Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton
It was all so in character. This little Faust, seeker of salvation by striving. This Sturm-und-Drang artist, with his two demanding masters, who tried to die with Goethe on his lips but was carried away by concern for his suit.
This is the book that made me want to write again after I'd more-or-less given it up for quite a while, and changed a lot of my ideas about how I wanted to write. These lines specifically were when I realized it. A friend in trade school passed it along to me, and I think it was honestly a turning point in my life.

I guess the quote is better in context, but most are.
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post #32 of 33
2/15/09 at 12:42pm
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It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but there's the weather for you. For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.
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The kraken stirs. And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.
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Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.
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Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.

Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys."
- From 'Good Omens' by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
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post #33 of 33
2/27/09 at 11:03am
I never claimed to be of a literary bent. I never went to college or sought any education except that which aided me in my chosen line of work. Everything I've learned, I learned on my own.

When I was going through a particularly grueling course, one of my instructors noticed that I was struggling, and in very real danger of failing... so he took me aside.

He showed me his desk, his awards and commendations... the man's career was encapsulated in his office. He looked at me and told me to look at the plaque on the door behind me. There was a small, framed quotation.

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell

He told me, "You don't have to be the strongest, or the bravest. You don't have to be the fastest runner, or the best shot. You don't have to do the most push-ups, or even have the shiniest boots. Everything you need to be a professional soldier is in that sentence. Always remember that."

And I always have.
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