Share beautiful passages of prose in your favorite fiction.

[si_blakely]

[QUOTE=Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose]
He said: ‘Men are huddled on the beaches like hunted birds. Frith, like the wounded
and hunted birds we used to find and bring to sanctuary. Over them fly the steel
peregrines, hawks, and gyrfalcons, and they have no shelter from these iron birds of prey.
They are lost and storm-driven and harried, like the Princesse Perdue you found and
brought to me out of the marshes many years ago, and we healed her. They need help, my
dear, as our wild creatures have needed help, and that is why I must go. It is something
that I can do. Yes, I can. For once - for once I can be a man and play my part.’
[/QUOTE]

Si

[Evin]

“… the PA system was moaning unctuously, like a lady hippopotamus
reading A. E. Housman …”

James Blish, “They Shall Have Stars”

[Annie-Xmas]

To Kill A Mockingbird:

A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose’s. . . . Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him

[all1966]

Isobelle Carmody, Night Gate:

If human lives be,
for their very brevity, sweet,
then beast lives are sweeter still…

Everytime we’ve had to make “The Call” for one of our beloved pets over the years, I think of this quote…and weep.

[all1966]

One more…from The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss:

It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them, too. That is rare and pure and perfect.

[Lissla_Lissar]

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and see amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparation compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have a ll been changed and put on incorruptability, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing which meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

-Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

[Dangerosa]

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

To Kill A Mockingbird

[Max_Torque]

In that instant when he saw the face of True Love, Christopher Caperton knew the awful gift the demon had given him. To reach the finest moment of one’s life, and to know it was the finest moment, that there would never be a more golden, more perfect, nobler or loftier or thrilling moment… and to continue to have to live a life that was all on the downhill side.

That was the curse and the blessing.

He knew, at last, that he was worthy of such a thing. In torment and sadness he knew he was just that worthy, and no more.

Harlan Ellison, “Grail”.

[BMalion]

" Lightly I toss my hat away,
Languidly over my arm let fall
The cloak that covers my bright array-
Then out swords, and to work withal!
A Launcelot, in his Lady’s hall…
A Spartacus, at the Hippodrome!..
I dally awhile with you, dear jackal,
Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!"
Cyrano de Bergerac written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand

[gallows_fodder]

The end of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked and dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he will never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

[terentii]

If someone out there has a copy of Winston Graham’s The Black Moon, would you please share the last few pages where Agatha Poldark is on her deathbed?

Otherwise, I’ll post them myself after I get back to Canada in a couple of weeks.

[Eleanor_of_Aquitaine]

The famous debauched sloth scene from Patrick O’Brian’s HMS Surprise:

The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast-- unaccountable headwinds by night-- and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. ‘Try a piece of this, old cock,’ he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. ‘It might put a little heart into you.’ The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.

Some minutes later he felt a touch upon his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying toward the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.

‘In this bucket,’ said Stephen, walking into the cabin, ‘in this small half-bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London, and Paris combined: these animalculae-- what is the matter with the sloth?’ It was curled on Jack’s knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack’s glass stood empty on the table. Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.

Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.’

I love the “More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem” bit.

[Haunted_Pasta]

He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them–the ship; and so is their country–the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  And, since we’ve already covered the opening of Lolita, I’ll also nominate the end:

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

[gallows_fodder]

This short story by Lou Beach.

I have to link to it because the story is only three sentences long. But they’re great sentences.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

NM

[Max_Torque]

I suppose there’s also the “shortest, saddest story every written”:

FOR SALE:

Baby shoes.

Never worn.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Max_Torque

I suppose there’s also the “shortest, saddest story every written”:

By Papa Hemingway, if I recall aright.

[Purd_Werfect]

Lots of great examples posted so far.

*“I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible… but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms." *

Arthur Miller - After the Fall.

[Bernard_Marx]

Pretty much anything from A Clockwork Orange would qualify, but this is my favourite:

Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.

• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

[Tad]

There’s something amazing about the image of a man floating out at sea alone and driven “mad” by the fight between the finite body, the infinite weight of space below and above him, and the infinite boundaries of the mind.

Moby Dick, Pip is lost at sea:

"Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea— mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

…

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."