# Share beautiful passages of prose in your favorite fiction. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 3, 2012, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150 "2012-07-03T23:06:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/21 "2012-07-04T04:41:27Z")
" I cannot get you close enough, I said to him, pitiful as a child, and never can and never will. We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not so sink back into the sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It’s embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are a part of that glamour, drama, change and should not be ashamed." \*\*I Cannot Get You Close Enough \*\* by Ellen Gilchrist ---
**Author:** ![madsircool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madsircool/32/3432_2.png) [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/22 "2012-07-04T04:58:48Z")
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler > [@](#): > > “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” > [@](#): > > “There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you found about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. > There is the soft and willing alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. > And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap d’Antibes, and Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying good night to his butler.” > [@](#): > > “You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.” > [@](#): > > “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” > [@](#): > > “There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.” ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/23 "2012-07-04T09:08:37Z")
“The leaves streamed down, trembling in the sun. They were not green; only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, this green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, bending over the road, and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress. The young man hoped he would not have to die. "Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope and the promise like a voice with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no sign of men for hours; he was alone, riding his bicycle down a forgotten trail through the hills of Pennsylvania where he had never been before, where he could feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.” — Ayn Rand, \*The Fountainhead \* ---
**Author:** ![polar\_bear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ec9cab/32.png) [@polar\_bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polar_bear)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/24 "2012-07-04T09:14:41Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. I was going to quote this:): I would have included the next bit. _She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly in school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita_ ---
**Author:** ![Archergal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c89c15/32.png) [@Archergal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Archergal)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/25 "2012-07-04T18:20:32Z")
I don’t know if it’s the most beautiful passage I know, but this one from The Last Unicorn is one of my favorites. In it, the Mayor sends his men to get the Unicorn, which they think is a white mare: > [@](#): > > But the men had not yet reached the pasture gate when the white mare jumped the fence and was gone into the night like a falling star. The two men stood where they were for a time, not heeding the Mayor’s commands to come back; and neither ever said, even to the other, why he stared after the magician’s mare so long. But now and then after that, they laughed with wonder in the middle of very serious events, and so came to be considered frivolous sorts. It says something to me about the transformative nature of beauty. Or something. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/26 "2012-07-04T20:47:34Z")
This is from memory. > [@](#): > > Jesus said to Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And Peter said, “You know that I love you.” > > And Jesus said again, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And Peter said, “You know that I love you.” > > And Jesus said to him a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And Peter was grieved that He asked him a third time, and he said, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/27 "2012-07-04T21:08:47Z")
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)](http://books.google.ca/books?id=MFzzCIo9dBwC&pg=PA121&dq=bird+mountain+eons+millions+eternity&hl=en&sa=X&ei=i7D0T6PsIYno6wHmuY3JBg&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=bird%20mountain%20eons%20millions%20eternity&f=false). ---
**Author:** ![Skara\_Brae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f0a364/32.png) [@Skara\_Brae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skara_Brae)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/28 "2012-07-04T21:29:57Z")
In honor of today… "The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the glass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow again with the roots toward Heaven. It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July." The Killer Angels, _Michael Shaara_ ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/29 "2012-07-04T21:40:44Z")
The final paragraphs of Angela Carter’s “Tiger’s Bride,” her retelling of Beauty and the Beast. The narrator has stripped and stands naked before the beast. > [@Angela Carter](#): > > A tremendous throbbing, as of the engine that makes the earth turn, filled the little room; he had begun to purr. > > The sweet thunder of this purr shook the old walls, made the shutters batter the windows until they burst apart and let in the white light of the snowy moon. Tiles came crashing down from the roof; I heard them fall into the courtyard far below. The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house, the walls began to dance. I thought: “It will all fall, everything will disintegrate.” > > He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. “He will lick the skin off me!” > > And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. ---
**Author:** ![jkirkman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ac8455/32.png) [@jkirkman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jkirkman)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/30 "2012-07-04T22:17:52Z")
“But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.” ― Ford Madox Ford, **The Good Soldier** ---
**Author:** ![EmilyG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/emilyg/32/364_2.png) [@EmilyG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EmilyG)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/31 "2012-07-04T22:30:13Z")
The opening line of Steinbeck’s _Cannery Row_: “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” ---
**Author:** ![koeeoaddi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/koeeoaddi/32/408_2.png) [@koeeoaddi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/koeeoaddi)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/32 "2012-07-04T22:39:23Z")
Skating at full speed, she turned to stop just before the dock, the silver blades of her skates sending up an abrupt shower of fresh-milled crystals that hung in the air and sparkled. – Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale ---
**Author:** ![JackieLikesVariety](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackielikesvariety/32/296_2.png) [@JackieLikesVariety](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JackieLikesVariety)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/33 "2012-07-04T23:04:11Z")
\*There was nothing to alarm him at first entry. Twigs crackled under his feet, logs tripped him, funguses on stumps resembled caricatures, and startled him for the moment by their likeness to something familiar and far away; but that was all fun, and exciting. It led him on, and he penetrated to where the light was less, and trees crouched nearer and nearer, and holes made ugly mouths at him on either side. Everything was very still now. The dusk advanced on him steadily, rapidly, gathering in behind and before; and the light seemed to be draining away like flood-water. Then the faces began. \* The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graham I find this as truly creepy as anything can be but the writing is beautiful! ---
**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/34 "2012-07-04T23:08:08Z")
YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. “So we can believe the big ones?” YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. “They’re not the same at all!” YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. Terry Pratchett, “Hogfather” ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/35 "2012-07-04T23:20:57Z")
> [@JackieLikesVariety](#): > > \*There was nothing to alarm him at first entry. Twigs crackled under his feet, logs tripped him, funguses on stumps resembled caricatures, and startled him for the moment by their likeness to something familiar and far away; but that was all fun, and exciting. It led him on, and he penetrated to where the light was less, and trees crouched nearer and nearer, and holes made ugly mouths at him on either side. > > Everything was very still now. The dusk advanced on him steadily, rapidly, gathering in behind and before; and the light seemed to be draining away like flood-water. > > Then the faces began. > \* I read **The Wind in the Willows** to my 3-year-old during bathtime. She loved it, but this whole sequence freaked her shit right out. ---
**Author:** ![Just1Lurk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c0e974/32.png) [@Just1Lurk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just1Lurk)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/36 "2012-07-05T00:45:10Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. Shirley Jackson, _The Haunting of Hill House_ ---
**Author:** ![Southern\_Yankee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/southern_yankee/32/2800_2.png) [@Southern\_Yankee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Southern_Yankee)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/37 "2012-07-05T00:52:58Z")
> [@](#): > > Across the road at the sawmill smoke was coming out of the chimney and Anselmo could smell it blown toward him through the snow. The fascists are warm, he thought, and they are comfortable, and tomorrow night we will kill them. It is a strange thing and I do not like to think of it. I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing. -_For Whom the Bell Tolls_ ---
**Author:** ![I\_Made\_French\_Toast\_For\_You](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/858c86/32.png) [@I\_Made\_French\_Toast\_For\_You](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Made_French_Toast_For_You)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/38 "2012-07-05T02:54:00Z")
> [@](#): > > ‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. – _Absalom, Absalom!_ ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/39 "2012-07-05T02:55:17Z")
> [@Just1Lurk](#): > > Shirley Jackson, _The Haunting of Hill House_ Good stuff. Stephen King quoted that passage in _'Salem’s Lot_. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150/40 "2012-07-05T02:58:10Z")
Just for fun… Qadgop the Mercoatan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armour of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/share-beautiful-passages-of-prose-in-your-favorite-fiction/627150.md?page=3)