This is a real long shot, but is it one of the Bronte sisters?
Or possibly Mary Shelley?
Yes! Charlotte, to be exact. It’s from Villette, her last novel.
Your turn.
Ahh. I feel at peace. Now that we know what it is…was driving me crazy. Not that i’ve read Villette, really. Go, Pipe…and would you be adverse to such if I slipped you a bill under the table…in exchange for some information about your book? 
Man, I really want to get one! I’ve got a great snippet to contribute!
Connor: Feel free to jump ahead of me. I’m at work right now, and so unless you want a passage from the Saskatchewan Occupational Health and Safety Act (1993) or IPT’s Crane and Rigging Handbook, we’re SOL. I think I have a couple of books back at the house, so I’ll go after you.
btw, my wife’s thesis for her Master’s was on the novels of Charlotte Bronte, so I probably should have figured that one out sooner.
This one should be easy (my taste in books is notoriously low-brow.)
“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.”
Jitterbug Perfume; Tom Robbins.
Now here’s mine. Nobody’ll get this, I don’t think, but it’s stuck in my mind.
“Bright was the summer of 1296. The war which had desolated Scotland was then at an end. Ambition seemed satiated; and the vanquished, after having passed under the yoke of their enemy, concluded they might wear their chains in peace. Such were the hopes of those Scottish noblemen who, early in the preceding spring, had signed the bond of submission to a ruthless conqueror, purchasing life at the price of all that makes life estimable–liberty and honor.”
We have a weiner!
I can’t even hazard a guess at yours, however.
Is it Dorothy Dunnett?
No. I’ll give you a hint. It’s a historical novel, concerning an event that was portrayed in a movie that won an Oscar–while utterly trashing historical fact.
The Scottish Chiefs, by Jane Porter.
God-DAMN, Orshee! I didn’t know anyone else under age 70 had read it!
I must admit - I didn’t read the book. I did a little web research. I figured from the paragraph and the hint you gave that the movie was Braveheart, but I couldn’t find a novel credit for that movie.
So I typed the first sentence into Google.com and got several web site links that gave me the book’s title and author.
Then I realized that I could do that with the first line of just about any book, so I didn’t add a line of my own.
come on guys, no cheating.
Who’s got the next passage?
"Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn’t just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old.
“These dates are incorrect.”
Brief History of Time by Steven Hawkings?
I would have to say ditto for that one. 