A few of your favorite passages?

[ForumBot]

Every now and then, I’ll be reading a book, and stumble across simply beautiful passages that just hit me in the gut and make me realize that someone out there has articulated a thought I’ve never been able to put out, has captured something internal and somehow brought it out. I’m not talking about Churchhill style one-liners or paragraphs full of puns. This is, to me, the best part of reading. Here are my two favorites:

“…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 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

“But when he wrote he felt something distinctive, exclusive within him; like an island full of wonderful suns and colours something that surged up within him out of the sea of grey sensations that crowded around him with cold indifference day after day.” --Robert Musil

[descamisado]

The moment I saw this thread, I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but passages from Tender Is The Night, which I recently read, instead The Great Gatsby.

“He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world.” Book 1, Ch. 15

Also:

“We were just like lovers–and then all at once we were lovers–and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself–except I guess I’m such a Goddamned degenerate I didn’t have the nerve to do it.” Book 2, Ch. 3

[PharmBoy]

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

To Kill a Mockingbird

[RealityChuck]

Mine is the “British candy” sequence in Thomas Pychon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. One of the funniest scenes ever written.

[Annie-Xmas]

“He made her play and she had almost forgotten how. Life had been so hard and so bitter.”

Gone With The Wind

[Ephemera]

Civilization is only a pretense; in a crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we’ll use the moment it comes close enough.

– Orson Scott Card, “Xenocide” (p. 325)

[Lissla_Lissar]

I know I’m boring about this book, but, from Gilead, about a son who has left his dying father:

*"And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favoured as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resourse he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. That is a thing I would love to see.

As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father’s house- even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence."*

I love that. “whom he has favoured as one does a wound”

Also, from The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin:

*Fulfilment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end.

It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and a return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads amd cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.*
There are lots of other passages I love, but those are two of my favourites. Sorry they’re so long.

[descamisado]

From How To Date A Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie), by Junot Díaz, in his short story collection called Drown.

For the comedy and pathos of the ending, after he’s gotten a date with a “halfie” and they end up making out, her father has dropped her off at the main character’s family-less house and, in preparation, he’s hidden food he’s ashamed of in “the cabinet above the stove”:

“When her father pulls in and beeps, let her go without too much of a goodbye. She won’t want it. During the next hour, the phone will ring. You will be tempted to pick it up. Don’t. Watch the shows you want to watch, without a family around to argue with you. Don’t go downstairs. Don’t fall asleep. It won’t help. Put the government cheese back in its place before your moms kills you.”

[Paladud]

From the beginning of King Rat, regarding a POW camp in early 1945:

@James Clavell

Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon.

Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was - an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls.

Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men. English and Australian mostly - a few New Zealanders and Canadians - the remnants of the armed forces of the Far East campaign.

These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.

[Spice_Weasel]

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Circular Ruins contains what I believe to be one of the most perfect descriptions of what it means to be a writer.

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple suited him, for it is contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

The final passage in particular

For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

vividly brings to mind an Orozco mural I saw at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, which is called Man of Fire. Hombre de Fuego was finished in 1939 and Las ruinas circulares was published in 1940. I have to wonder.

[Der_Trihs]

I like this one from Mother of Demons.

@Eric Flint

“The world is a place of evil. It has always been so. Evil cannot be destroyed.”

“On the world from which I came, Nukurren, there was also much evil. Much evil, and much as you have seen it on this world. There is still some to this day. But not so much as in the past.”

“The demons have conquered evil?”

“You cannot conquer evil, Nukurren. Evil is not a thing from beyond, a foe to be vanquished. It is a thing which emerges from within the life of a people. It can only be changed, by changing that life. That is what we seek to do.”

[jjimm]

There’s an amazing secular eulogy in A Suitable Boy.

I can’t be bothered to look it up in the 1,000-word book right now, but says something like Mrs Rupa Mera was gone, her flesh was burned, and her bones were just ashes floating in the Ganges. But Mrs Rupa Mera still existed - in the kindness of her children, in the sense of humor of her nephew, in the beautiful eyes of her daughter, in the memories of her husband, in the fact that a homeless person was able to eat for a few days.

And so on like that. It made me sob.

[BrassyPhrase]

I read an excerpt of The Gulag Archipelago when I was young. Later I read I and II. I attempted first during high school–when this very sweet girl that I had a class with saw me reading and asked “Is that in English???” I assume Gulag and Archipelago weren’t words she’d ever read before.

I loved this quote and it still resonates with me.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
–Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.