Share beautiful passages of prose in your favorite fiction.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

More seriously…
“‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,’ he suggested. ‘After that, my own rule is to let everything alone.’”
Chapter IX, Pg. 163
The Great Gatsby

[LawMonkey]

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don’t harrass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your apppearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!

Dostoyevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov. This passage, which I first encountered in Watership Down, led me to read The Brothers Karamazov many years later.

[Dendarii_Dame]

And it was still hot.

Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak

[Just1Lurk]

@Elendil_s_Heir

Good stuff. Stephen King quoted that passage in 'Salem’s Lot.

It was reading that passage from Salem’s Lot (or was it Danse Macabre?) that led me to read The Haunting of Hill House in the first place. No matter how many times I read it, that last line still gives me chills. “…And whatever walked there, walked alone.” Brrrr!

Another one from Tolkien:

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, reckoning nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain the context to you, Elendil’s Heir

[Procrustus]

It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.

The first line of the great Jim Harrison novel, The Road Home

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@madsircool

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

I’ve said before (though perhaps not here) that Raymond Chandler was a poet who happened to prefer writing in paragraphs. The plots of his novels are almost beside the point. He just takes you into his Marlowe’s skin and lets you live as him for a little while. The worst thing he ever wrote was wonderful.

[Dung_Beetle]

@Just1Lurk

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

One of my favorites! So I’ll have to choose another…how about some more Bradbury? In The Shore Line at Sunset, two men and a boy find something wonderful lying on the beach.

Her face…
The men bent half down in wonder.
Her face was white sand sculpture, with a few water drops shimmering on it like summer rain upon a cream-colored rose. Her face was that moon which when seen by day is pale and unbelievable in the blue sky. It was milk-marble veined with faint violet in the temples. The eyelids, closed down upon the eyes, were powdered with a faint water color, as if the eyes beneath gazed through the fragile tissue of the lids and saw them standing there above her, looking down and looking down. The mouth was a pale flushed sea-rose, full and closed upon itself. And her neck was slender and white and her breasts were small and white, now covered, uncovered, covered, uncovered, in the flow of water, the ebb of water, the flow, the ebb, the flow. And the breasts were flushed at their tips, and her body was startlingly white, almost an illumination, a white-green lightning against the sand. And as the water shifted her, her skin glinted like the surface of a pearl.
The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to very pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home. The woman was the sea, and the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice waters of the other.

[Sailboat]

@Skara_Brae

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

That passage alone might have been what won it the Pulitzer Prize. Love it.
I’ll submit just one passage from James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks, although the entire book is wonderfully written:

The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger, bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs, green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and the pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a sleepy stream, in which swift and slippery snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful secrets.

[madsircool]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

I’ve said before (though perhaps not here) that Raymond Chandler was a poet who happened to prefer writing in paragraphs. The plots of his novels are almost beside the point. He just takes you into his Marlowe’s skin and lets you live as him for a little while. The worst thing he ever wrote was wonderful.

That was beautiful.

[Bryan_Ekers]

“This is John Galt speaking…”

[Sailboat]

Nitpick:

@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]

@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
[QUOTE=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.
[/QUOTE]

[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.

[Phedre_no_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)