“The small boys came early to the hanging.”
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
“Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.”
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
There was a boy named Eustance Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
– Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. "
The past is obscure. It is blurred by dust and scratch marks, hidden by wide pieces of brown tape, soot and mold stains. I am sifting through old documents that are oxidising and crumbling as I touch them; things that have been burning, slowly, for a hundred years, throwing clouds of tiny particles into the air.
Kirsten Bakis, Lives of the Monster Dogs
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows
Johnny never knew for certain why he started seeing the dead.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
A pomo writing professor of mine used this line to demonstrate how fiction changes with the times. When Gibson wrote Neuromancer, this line conjured images of a gray, staticky, electricity-filled stormy sky, like a television tuned to a dead channel.
Kids who grew up in the nineties read this line and see a clear, electric-blue sky, an artificial tense happy-blue sky, like a television tuned to a dead channel.
Both images work, but they’re very different from one another.
Daniel
Television static is now blue? That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard.
Well, it isn’t blue static. It’s just a blank, solid blue screen that the TV displays when it can’t get enough signal to display a picture.
“The day broke gray and dull.”
- Maugham
“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
The Best Ever:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…”
-James Joyce, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
Second Best:
“They’re out there.
Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”
-Ken Kesey, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
Third:
“The place I like the best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).”
-Banana Yoshimoto, “Kitchen”
We were just outside of Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Sooooo… what’s it like being a pretentious dork? James Joyce indeed.
I liked “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Thanks for the explanation, now I know what you/he means. I don’t have a TV that does that though, I have a Blaupunkt and not some shitty Toshiba, I guess that’s why I was confused.
Well, this is actually the second paragraph of The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman by J. P. Donleavy:
The husband of this woman [who was giving birth in Ireland], a man as well known for his gambling as he was for his generosity among cronies, had married for money and was, as he was mostly, away in England for the racing. And upon that birth day he had waged one hundred pounds on a rank outsider at one hundred to one, which had come waltzing in by eight lengths, a winner. And upon hearing the news of a boy sent a cable
NAME HIM DANCER
It’s not like it’s a Japanese phenomenon. My Loewe shows the “blue screen of death”, too. How old it that thing you’ve got?
“A History of the Six Duchies is of necessity a history of its ruling family, the Farseers.”
Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice
“The High House, Evenmere, that lifts its gabled roofs among tall hills overlooking a country of ivy and hawthorn and blackberries sweet but small as the end of a child’s finger, has seldom been seen by ordinary men.”
James Stoddard, The High House
Dear SPOOFE:
Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s classic A WRINKLE IN TIME actually DOES begin with “It was a dark and stormy night.” In fact, it’s the whole first paragraph. And it’s the only trite, commonplace or unimaginative thing in the whole book.
The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park.
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop
The sun was bright, the sky was blue, the time was May; New Orleans was heaven, and heaven must have been only another New Orleans, it couldn’t have been any better.
(Cornell Woolrich, Waltz into Darkness)
Not my favourite book (rather a book forced upon me in High School).
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
or in English.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
From Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Kafka