Discussion: Favorite Passages/Lines from Literature

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"He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
~-F.Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Love in the Time of Cholera

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.~ Jane Hamilton in a Map of the World

I haven't read any Jane Hamilton, but that passage is really foreboding and makes me want to read more.

I'm definitely a fan of Marquez and Fitzgerald.

I'll come back to this thread when I have my bookshelf at my disposal...

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,

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Howl - Ginsberg

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.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

Ah, the dreadful patient persistence of addiction, he thought. What had Hemingway said? Not this August, nor this September--this year you have to do what you like. But the time comes around again. It always does. Sooner or later you stick something back in your big dumb old mouth again. A drink, a smoke, maybe the barrel of a shotgun. Not this August, nor this September...

"Secret Window, Secret Sharer", from Stephen King's Four Past Midnight.

In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely
justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and
wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in
blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with
pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty
handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there
is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and
drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute
that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine
freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of
this dung-heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want
roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish
it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will
reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close
his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured, disgrace,
humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui --in the belief that overnight
something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all
the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in
there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and
drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the
cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host
touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless
torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of
relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by
slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the
carcass is ripped open.

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends
eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds
which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last
moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should
appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even
the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two
enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than
anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it
would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest
dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever
has, and probably nobody ever again will.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary
effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had
been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would
alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved felt as though a great burden had been lifted
from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after
touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse
I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance
to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had
happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been
destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact.
Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there
might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid,
for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested
itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made
up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that
henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.

Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet
and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the
day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the
quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had
one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally
altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part
of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of
his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds
God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow
into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the
soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If
to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a
cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to
preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I
have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat
no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I
shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am
only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world
which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a
jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena
I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself. -Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. TS Eliot - The Wasteland

The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”

“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”

After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”

After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

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~ William Burroughs / Naked Lunch

+1 to Eliot and Burroughs!!!! "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" is a personal favourite quote of mine.

My favourite line would have to be "Let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky." T.S Eliot The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufock

"Suffering because of being crippled is not for you in your childhood; it is reserved for those men and women who look at you."

Alan Marshall - I Can Jump Puddles

I remember spending a substantial period of time copying passages from Dorian Gray when I was in my last year of high school. I'll come back to this; I like this idea.

^ i remember my Nanna reading that book years and years ago...
"for tonight, with your own eyes, you will see my soul." - The Portrait of Dorian Gray

Good sentences make for good books IMO. Here's a few:


"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
--Franz Kafka ("The Metamorphosis")

"I knew every raindrop by its name."
--Denis Johnson ("Car Crash While Hitchhiking")

"My wife and I sat outside drinking, each of us wrapped in a separate silence."
--Kevin Brockmeier ("The Ceiling")

"We keep coming back / to what we are, each time older, / more freaked out or less afraid."
--Tony Hoagland (“History of Desire")

"Five o'clock rolled down from the sun and plumped soundlessly into the sea."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Offshore Pirate”)

"I drove slowly through downtown, and then under the Ninth Avenue Bridge, and out into the vast anonymity of tract homes and dry gullies, of evenly spaced streetlights with nothing to illuminate."
--Daniel Alarcón ("Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot")

"'I was never one single thing anyway,' she thought. 'Never my own. I was only loaned to myself.'"
--Saul Bellow ("Leaving the Yellow House")

"Give me back the moon / with its frail light falling across a face."
--Philip Levine ("You Can Have It")

"A dull yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending."
-James Joyce ("The Dead")

From They Whisper by Robert Olen Butler
And down at the end of the long drive there was a pothole and a road crew and a cauldron mixing tar with the smell of tar a girl rides past me on her bike and she has long russet hair and she is barefoot and I am ten years old and I stand beneath the horse chestnut tree in my yard and watch her go by and it is early summer, school is out and all the summer lies ahead and somewhere in the direction she's heading, a street is being resurfaced and the smell of tar is in the air and I run to my bike and I race after her, watching the left of her hair behind her and she is willow thin and her bare heels rise and fall and rise and fall and the smell of tar grows stronger and she turns at the corner and I turn and ahead the street is slick black and at the far end the dump truck has just whooshed into emptiness and stops in a cloud of gravel dust and I've been thinking all along about how to overtake her, how to speak to her, and miraculously she stops ahead and gets off and nudges her kick-stand down with the ball of her pretty foot and already I have the instinct from this moment of enchantment looking at her summer-bare feet to follow the line from her instep up her ankle up her leg to the sweet subtlety of her knee to her thigh and then to vague thoughts of things that are still as secret to me as the origin of the universe.

Missing a kick
It closed anyway.

J.K.

Ok these are from a similar thread in Aus Social (http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=227514&page=2&highlight=book) but I'll think of some new ones when I have a little more time:

HE HAD THAT WONDERFULLY DEPRAVED look not only of the dedicated feverish European Waiter alcoholic but something ratty and sly- wild, he peered at no one, was aloof in the hall like an aristocrat of some own interior silence and reason to say nothing, as, you will find, all true drinkers in their drinking sickness which is the reprieve from excitement will have a thin loose smile vague at the corners of their mouths and be communicant with something deep inside themselves be it revulsion or shuddering hangoveral joy and wont communication with others for the nonce (thats the business of the screamingdrinking night), will instead stand alone, suffer, smile, inwardly laugh alone, kings of pain.

- Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

The completely flat areas are the purest view. Much of Vastitas Borealis is so flat that only millions of years of existence as the floor of an ocean can explain it. And parts of Argyle Planitia are equally flat. We cannot lose these places. In these regions one stands confronted by a radically simplified landscape. It is a surreal experience to look around oneself - surreal in the literal sense of the word, in that one seems to stand in a place "over-real" or "more than real" - a higher state than reality; or reality revealed in its barest, most heraldic simplicity. The world says then, This is what the cosmos exists of; rock, sky, sun, life (that's you). What a massive aesthetic impact is conveyed by this so-simplified landscape! It forces you to pay attention to it; it is so remarkable you keep looking at it, you cannot do or think anything else - as if living in a perpetual total eclipse, or within any other physical miracle. Which of course is always the case. Remember.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians


And this passage I fucking love lots upon lots:

"Charlie?" his wife said in her sleep.
Slowly, he took off the other shoe.
His wife smiled in her sleep.
Why?
She's immortal. She has a son.
Your son, too!
But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy, and often hate the warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
Three A.M. That's our reward. Three in the morn. The soul's midnight. The tide goes out, the soul ebbs.

- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Although I thought Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perceptions was a bit wishy washy in parts I really like this passage:

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand in to the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

And as someone with a keen interest in atheism, nature, biology, evolution, and existence in general this passage from Albert Hofmann's LSD: My Problem Child speaks volumes to me:

There is less danger of a cleft reality experience arising in a natural environment. In field and forest, and in the animal world sheltered therein, indeed in every garden, a reality is perceptible that is infinitely more real, older, deeper, and more wondrous than everything made by people, and that will yet endure, when the inanimate, mechanical, and concrete world again vanishes, becomes rusted and fallen into ruin. In the sprouting, growth, blooming, fruiting, death, and regermination of plants, in their relationship with the sun, whose light they are able to convert into chemically bound energy in the form of organic compounds, out of which all that lives on our earth is built; in the being of plants the same mysterious, inexhaustible, eternal life energy is evident that has also brought us forth and takes us back again into its womb, and in which we are sheltered and united with all living things.

mariacallas said:

Share them here

"He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
~-F.Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

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I remembered making a note about Gatsby of a favoured passage so went looking for it. Turns out it's exactly the passage you mentioned. Great minds

lostpunk5545 said:

"Charlie?" his wife said in her sleep.
Slowly, he took off the other shoe.
His wife smiled in her sleep.
Why?
She's immortal. She has a son.
Your son, too!
But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy, and often hate the warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
Three A.M. That's our reward. Three in the morn. The soul's midnight. The tide goes out, the soul ebbs.

- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

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Wow. Just wow. Thanks for sharing

mariacallas said:

Share them here

"He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
~-F.Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

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i fucking love that paragraph, some parts of gatsby are just so fucking perfect it makes me shiver

also, i love the very end. i remember reading it for the first time in high school and getting all misty

"And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."