Share beautiful passages of prose in your favorite fiction.

[Sailboat]

Nitpick:

Originally Posted by Skara_Brae

washing the rocks and the glass and the white bones of the dead,

I believe it's "the grass," not glass.

[Northern Piper]

The Death of Falstaff


PISTOL Boy, bristle thy courage up; for Falstaff he is dead,
And we must yearn therefore.

BARDOLPH Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell!

Hostess Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. A' made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; a' parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields. 'How now, sir John!' quoth I 'what, man! be o' good cheer.' So a' cried out 'God, God, God!' three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So a' bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and they were as cold as any stone, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.

NYM They say he cried out of sack.

Hostess Ay, that a' did.

BARDOLPH And of women.

Hostess Nay, that a' did not.

Boy Yes, that a' did; and said they were devils incarnate.

Hostess A' could never abide carnation; 'twas a colour he never liked.

Boy A' said once, the devil would have him about women.

Hostess A' did in some sort, indeed, handle women; but then he was rheumatic, and talked of the whore of Babylon.

Boy Do you not remember, a' saw a flea stick upon Bardolph's nose, and a' said it was a black soul burning in hell-fire?

BARDOLPH Well, the fuel is gone that maintained that fire: that's all the riches I got in his service.

NYM Shall we shog? the king will be gone from Southampton.

[Skara_Brae]

Originally Posted by Sailboat

Nitpick:
I believe it's "the grass," not glass.

Oops, sorry! Typo.

Here's another:

"He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling. Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love"

Persuasion, Jane Austen

[Meatros]

HP Lovecraft - Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

[GuanoLad]

From Douglas Adams's Life, the Universe, and Everything

Originally Posted by Douglas Adams

Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

[Stowed Bob]

from Dune Messiah

His words oddly in rhythm to the melody of his son's baliset, Farok said: "I owned a crysknife, water rings to ten liters, my own lance which had been my father's, a coffee service, a bottle made of red glass older than any memory in my sietch. I had my own share of our spice, but no money. I was rich and did not know it. Two wives I had: one plain and dear to me, the other stupid and obstinate, but with form and face of an angel. I was a Fremen Naib, a rider of worms, master of the leviathan and of the sand."

The youth across the courtyard picked up the beat of his melody.

"I knew many things without the need to think of them," Farok said. "I knew there was water far beneath our sand, held there in bondage by the Little Makers. I knew that my ancestors sacrificed virgin to Shai-hulud . . . before Liet-Kynes made us stop. It was wrong of us to stop. I had seen the jewels in the mouth of a worm. My soul had four gates and I knew them all."

He fell silent, musing.

"Then the Atreides came with his witch mother," Scytale said.

[Biffy the Elephant Shrew]

From Anna Livia's closing soliloquy in Finnegans Wake:

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.

[carlb]

I, admittedly, have a soft spot for selfless courage and sacrifice. In this vein, I find the oath that men of the Night's Watch take in A Song of Ice and Fire very moving.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.

Now, we all know that precious few of the sworn brothers completely live up to this oath, but the ideal that it puts forth is one of utter subordination of the self for the greater good. I particularly like, "I shall wear no crowns and win no glory." Not only are they going to put themselves square in the path of unholy things, but nobody will note these acts, nor particularly care. It's like Col. Jessup's speech about being on the wall in A Few Good Men, except that Jessup wanted the recognition and the glory very badly. The men of the Night's Watch have become reconciled to their remote place in the thought's of others, but they do their job anyway.

It's a brutal, cold, but deeply moving kind of beauty that I read in those words. Seems like a fine code to live up to.

[Phèdre nó Delaunay]

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

[Boyo Jim]

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Ripley, Aliens

(brings tears to my eyes)

[si_blakely]

Originally Posted by Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose

He said: ‘Men are huddled on the beaches like hunted birds. Frith, like the wounded
and hunted birds we used to find and bring to sanctuary. Over them fly the steel
peregrines, hawks, and gyrfalcons, and they have no shelter from these iron birds of prey.
They are lost and storm-driven and harried, like the Princesse Perdue you found and
brought to me out of the marshes many years ago, and we healed her. They need help, my
dear, as our wild creatures have needed help, and that is why I must go. It is something
that I can do. Yes, I can. For once - for once I can be a man and play my part.’

Si

[Evin]

"... the PA system was moaning unctuously, like a lady hippopotamus
reading A. E. Housman ..."

James Blish, "They Shall Have Stars"

[Annie-Xmas]

To Kill A Mockingbird:

A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose’s. . . . Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him

[all1966]

Isobelle Carmody, Night Gate:

If human lives be,
for their very brevity, sweet,
then beast lives are sweeter still...

Everytime we've had to make "The Call" for one of our beloved pets over the years, I think of this quote...and weep.

[all1966]

One more...from The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss:

It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them, too. That is rare and pure and perfect.

[Lissla Lissar]

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and see amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparation compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have a ll been changed and put on incorruptability, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing which meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

-Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

[Dangerosa]

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

To Kill A Mockingbird

[Max Torque]

In that instant when he saw the face of True Love, Christopher Caperton knew the awful gift the demon had given him. To reach the finest moment of one’s life, and to know it was the finest moment, that there would never be a more golden, more perfect, nobler or loftier or thrilling moment... and to continue to have to live a life that was all on the downhill side.

That was the curse and the blessing.

He knew, at last, that he was worthy of such a thing. In torment and sadness he knew he was just that worthy, and no more.

Harlan Ellison, "Grail".

[BMalion]

" Lightly I toss my hat away,
Languidly over my arm let fall
The cloak that covers my bright array-
Then out swords, and to work withal!
A Launcelot, in his Lady's hall...
A Spartacus, at the Hippodrome!...
I dally awhile with you, dear jackal,
Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!"


Cyrano de Bergerac written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand

[gallows fodder]

The end of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:

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 and 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 will 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 shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

[terentii]

If someone out there has a copy of Winston Graham's The Black Moon, would you please share the last few pages where Agatha Poldark is on her deathbed?

Otherwise, I'll post them myself after I get back to Canada in a couple of weeks.

[Eleanor of Aquitaine]

The famous debauched sloth scene from Patrick O'Brian's HMS Surprise:

The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast-- unaccountable headwinds by night-- and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. 'Try a piece of this, old cock,' he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. 'It might put a little heart into you.' The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.

Some minutes later he felt a touch upon his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying toward the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.

'In this bucket,' said Stephen, walking into the cabin, 'in this small half-bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London, and Paris combined: these animalculae-- what is the matter with the sloth?' It was curled on Jack's knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack's glass stood empty on the table. Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.

Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, 'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.'

I love the "More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem" bit.

[Haunted Pasta]

He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them--the ship; and so is their country--the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


And, since we've already covered the opening of Lolita, I'll also nominate the end:

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

[gallows fodder]

This short story by Lou Beach.

I have to link to it because the story is only three sentences long. But they're great sentences.

[Skald the Rhymer]

NM

[Max Torque]

I suppose there's also the "shortest, saddest story every written":

FOR SALE:

Baby shoes.

Never worn.

[Skald the Rhymer]

Originally Posted by Max Torque

I suppose there's also the "shortest, saddest story every written":

By Papa Hemingway, if I recall aright.

[Purd Werfect]

Lots of great examples posted so far.

“I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible… but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms."

Arthur Miller - After the Fall.

[Bernard Marx]

Pretty much anything from A Clockwork Orange would qualify, but this is my favourite:

Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

[Tad--]

There's something amazing about the image of a man floating out at sea alone and driven "mad" by the fight between the finite body, the infinite weight of space below and above him, and the infinite boundaries of the mind.

Moby Dick, Pip is lost at sea:

"Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea— mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

...

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

[midnight-dreary]

“She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.” And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek."

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Carmilla

[Elendil's Heir]

Originally Posted by carlb

I, admittedly, have a soft spot for selfless courage and sacrifice. In this vein, I find the oath that men of the Night's Watch take in A Song of Ice and Fire very moving....

Yes, that struck me, too. Very good.

Originally Posted by BMalion

" Lightly I toss my hat away,
Languidly over my arm let fall....

Cyrano de Bergerac written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand

Oh, yes, definitely. Thanks.

[TreacherousCretin]

I couldn't begin to try selecting examples from it, but James Dickey's Deliverance is the book that stands out for me.
Dickey of course was a renowned poet who happened to write three novels, and Deliverance is a virtuosic display of elegant wordmanship.

[epersimmon]

Originally Posted by InternetLegend

I've always loved this passage from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying:

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

There's just something about all those words that describe how words distance us from the reality of life that's always really gotten to me.

My favorite line is also from "As I Lay Dying," and I've never forgotten it:

On the dark floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a very long time they have not walked on floors.

I may have the punctuation wrong. I don't have the book, just the memory.

[KarlGauss]

Originally Posted by KarlGauss

Perhaps not the most beautiful passage, but, when I read it, certainly one that impressed me more than any other I could recall.

From, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by James Joyce (setting: the priest admonishes young boys that they will suffer for all eternity in the fires of Hell should they ever 'cause the saints to cry' by masturbating):

Please click to read the paragraph (a bit long for me to type out with my one finger hacking and, alas, the source does not seem to permit copy and pasting of the text).

Probably not too many people are still following this thread, but I eventually came up with most of the quote (it's missing the first part where Joyce emphasizes the unbearable pain of Hell). He continues:

Originally Posted by James Joyce

For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

[BrainGlutton]

Incomparably less large and vast than the Russian Empire, incomparably less powerful than the German Empire, incomparably less sophisticated than the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- still Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, its mere name a subject for risibility elsewhere, was his empire, his native land. It may not have functioned very well? so much the more was he pleased that it functioned at all. Its Secret Police was a joke? so much the more he too would enjoy the joke; no one laughed at the Secret Polices in the other empires. Its many languages rivaled Babel or Pentecost? let them: at least here no schoolboy was flogged for praying in whatsoever minor mother tongue. One empire had already, fairly recently, gone from the political map of Europe; and although the name of Bonaparte still rang like a tocsin here and there, it was uncertain that the Prince Imperial would himself ever ring it successfully.

Day by day others asked, how fared their country's wheat compared with Russian wheat, its butter with Danish butter, its timber with Carpathian timber, its tar with Baltic tar, its cloth with English cloth? Day by day the same spokes of the universal wheel flashed by: love, sorrow, terror, death, success, failure, hunger, joy, growth, decay, weakness, strength: the wheel turned and turned and turned: nothing stayed the same, no one bathed twice in the same flowing water for the water had flowed on and flowed away. There is no star at the pole of the universe, young Dr. Eszterhazy recollected the ancient astronomer; and if there was and long had been but blankness in the comparable area of his own country, then might there not be a space and place for him? What he hoped for, others did not even think of; what others did not think, might he not think of?

And after thinking, do?

-- "The Autogondola Invention," The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, by Avram Davidson,

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Meatros

HP Lovecraft - Call of Cthulhu:

A, yes, Lovecraft! "The Festival":

So I read again that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one—in waking hours—who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.

“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

"The Rats in the Walls":

My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea. Something bumped into me—something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living. . . . Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things? . . . The war ate my boy, damn them all . . . and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret . . . No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’ fat face on that flabby, fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died! . . . Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la Poer? . . . It’s voodoo, I tell you . . . that spotted snake . . . Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do! . . . ’Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust . . . wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? . . . Magna Mater! Magna Mater! . . . Atys . . . Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! . . . Ungl . . . ungl . . . rrrlh . . . chchch . . .

[BrainGlutton]

‘Exactly,’ said Puck. ‘Can you wonder that the People of the Hills don’t care to be confused with that painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of impostors? Butterfly wings, indeed! I’ve seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou’-westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the castle, and the Horses of the Hill wild with fright. Out they’d go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they’d be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again. Butterfly-wings! It was Magic—Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hill picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!’

-- Puck of Pook's Hill, Rudyard Kipling

[tadtooornamental]

"We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it."

Son of a Witch by Gregory Macquire

This line just stuck in my head- it's beautiful!

[Maserschmidt]

Originally Posted by Skald the Rhymer

By Papa Hemingway, if I recall aright.

http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/babyshoes.asp

[Jimmy Chitwood]

Ulysses:

Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent and damp as a snail's bed.

He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.

-- Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them to you, sir.

Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.

-- Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.

-- Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.

-- Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.

-- No, sir.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

[mbh]

Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhh!!!!! The books I want to quote are in storage! Can any Roger Zelazny fans give me a hand here?

One passage from Nine Princes in Amber. In the scene where Corwin cures his amnesia, and remembers Amber.

One passage from The Guns of Avalon, right after Corwin kills Melkin.
It begins "And that was how we met, Lorraine and I, in a land called Lorraine . . . "
and it ends " . . . until that day, I will not wash my hands, nor let them stand idle."

[Skald the Rhymer]

Originally Posted by Maserschmidt

http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/babyshoes.asp

What have I told you about bothering me with facts?

[BrainGlutton]

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, forming integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.

-- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

[Elendil's Heir]

"It is a distressing fact about political decisions that there are people who make them. Distressing, that is, to the considerable number of other people who would like to, but don't." - Ben Pimlott, Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (the title is from the second verse of "God Save the Queen")

[Tanaqui]

All beautiful quotes, indeed! I've found some good ideas for future reading. These kinds of posts are always fun for me because although I love to read, I've never read much of the classics. It's always good to get a reminder that some books are classics for a reason!

For me, I'll quote a passage in a book that moved me greatly. I think it's because it's about dealing with depression, at a time when I was depressed--not the kind of depression that comes from chemical imbalance, or that needs to be treated with medication, but the more ordinary unhappiness of everyday life, that can sometimes, nonetheless, be almost too heavy to bear.

For awhile every time I got on the train I'd see one of those ads. "Una luz brillara en tu camina. Descubre lo que te has perdido." A brilliant light in your path. Discover what you have lost.

The light angles across Brooklyn, red now. It comes through the train windows. Sunset used to depress me. But I learned in Baffin Island, you've just got to remember the light, keep it inside you, and wait. The sun comes back every morning.

From Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang.

[chrisk]

From chapter 12 of "The Farthest Shore," by Ursula K. LeGuin:

"My name is no use to you," Ged said. "You have no power over me at all. I am a living man; my body lies on the beach of Selidor, under the sun, on the turning earth. And when that body dies, I will be here; but only in name, in name alone, in shadow. Do you not understand? Did you never understand, you who called up so many shadows from the dead, who summoned all the hosts of the perished, even my lord Erreth-Akbe, wisest of us all? Did you not understand that he, even he, is but a shadow and a name? His death did not diminish life. Nor did it diminish him. He is there -- there, not here! Here is nothing, dust and shadows. There, he is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?"

"You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness."

(That's two passages, separated by a dozen short lines of dialog that aren't so beautiful, though rather cool in context.)