The scene in Heart of Darkness where the Narrator goes to visit Kurtz’ Intended. It just has a wonderfully evocative atmosphere (I always picture it as completely Bladerunnerish.)
I love the scene from Silence mentioned in the OP. I think it’s more than marginally witty. It’s the kind of stuff Harris completely forgot to do in Hannibal and thereafter
Two separate scenes from "Gone With The Wind’: Rhett tells Scarlett he goes to New Orleans to visit his ward. Prostitute Belle Watling tells Melanie she has a son who goes to school in New Orleans.
Not too hard to connect those two dots.
Agreed, he had it in Red Dragon and SotL but doesn’t seem to any more. I haven’t read Black Sunday.
The chapter “The Economics of Coth” in James Branch Cabell’s The Silver Stallion.
In a few pages, Coth has returned from his adventures, grows old and dies. Makes me tear up just thinking about it.
Snow Crash. YT’s mom works for the government. She drives to work, pays to park, goes through the metal detector, and sits down at a workstation. Not her workstation, just a workstation. No desktops, incidentally, and no cubicle partitions. Pulls up a company-wide email. Pages upon pages about how to conserve the office toilet-paper supply. And she notes the time before she starts reading, because she will be evaluated on how long she took reading it. Too long, she’s wasting time. Too short, she must have skimmed it. Then she’s escorted to a windowless room for a urine test and a polygraph. Because her daughter had been arrested, you see, and they knew most of the answers already because the house was bugged. Imagine if you could hear that your kid was suspected of treason or whatever they were calling it, and it doesn’t make you panicked or upset, because you’re always looking over both shoulders, and you’re never in a good mood.
Which story was that? Now I want to go read it all over again.
My personal all-time favourite:
“Jack, you have debauched my sloth!”
In “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Hemingway there is a passage that describes the protagonist and his lover laying down in the grass about to make love. The author describes the way the woman’s head breaks the grass as she lays back. It’s literary perfection, the way it’s done.
One of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books - I think it might be The Warrior’s Apprentice.
There’s a little interlude after a battle in where two characters (previously unmentioned in the story) are picking up the dead from both sides. One of them, a middle-aged woman, does her work with great sensitivity and compassion - the other, a young man, treats it like “just another job” (and an unpleasant one at that).
One of the bodies they pick up is a young female soldier. The older woman brings her in, writes out a card with her name and rank on it, then calmly goes over to a locker, brings out a wedding dress, and puts it on her. She places her next to one of the other dead soldiers (with the comment “he has a nice face. I think she would have liked him”)
The younger worker is looking at this woman like she’s gone insane - she, having completed this task, simply goes on with her work.
Then he realises that she never looked at the young soldier’s dogtags before writing the name and rank on the card. She knew it already. The young soldier was her daughter.
It’s been about four years since I read that book, and I still can’t recall that scene to mind without tearing up.
Regards,
Shodan
This is the same one I was going to mention. It’s a brilliant story-within-a-story. What’s funny, though, is that it goes completely over Brigid’s head…
My favorite scene is later in that same book, when Claire is in John Grey’s office in Jamaica, and Grey describes to her his last encounter with Jamie at Helwater. The scene where Grey promised to look after Willie - for the sake of friendship.
I was coming in to mention another scene in this book. My memory of the details are spotty because it’s been a while since I read it, but I believe Robert Jordan is spying on a bridge guard he is supposed to kill. He has a short dialog about the guard. How he is just another man who has never done anything to him personally, yet he must kill him. It really captures the (in)humanity of war.
In Death of an Adept, there is a scene where the main character is talking to the father of his fiance. The father is terminally ill with cancer and is in great pain every day. We come to find out that the father is holding onto life in constant pain because he promised his daughter when she was a child that he would be there on her wedding day. So they hold an impromptu ceremony there in the hospital, and during the ceremony the father passes away. It’s one of the most touching scenes I’ve ever read. Even after more than 5 or 6 times reading the series, that scene can still bring a tear to my eye.
Whaletalk by Chris Crutcher
It’s the story of a misfit team of swimmers. Midway through their season, the coach realizes that about half his swimmers are failing one or more classes, so he pairs for them to tutor each other. The brainiac with the psychopath, etc.
My favorite bit from the scene is when the coach approaches Chris? (can’t remember the name for sure). Chris is a special ed kid, born drug addicted, abused by his mother’s boyfriend–leading to brain-damage, etc. But he’s passing all his classes. So the coach asks him if he likes to color. Oh yes, he likes to color. Does he know what a tutor does? Does a tutor color? Yes. In this case, he colors guts.
So the coach assigns Chris to color guts in a biology coloring book, the guy directing the coloring is learning what the names of all the parts are, so that he will pass biology and be able to keep swimming.
Ah, yes, when Sir John talks about how the love of your life is not the one for you. Very sad and poignant all the way around.
Thank you for bringing back some good memories. My mom used to read us the stories out loud.
A pleasure.
I remember I read my first Holmes story at about age ten or so: The Speckled Band. Scared the bejeezus out of me, even though my bedroom didn’t have a bell-pull. 
John D. MacDonald was good at this sort of stuff.
I remember a brief scene from one of his novels where the main character is standing in his kitchen, looking out the window. His wife is out of town and he’s batching it. He’s drinking a cup of coffee and his mind starts to wander. He fantasizes a couple of improbable things, then suddenly farts and laughs to himself at how appropriate the timing was.
A very human moment.
There’s a bit in a book called Are We There Yet by David Levithan. It’s not very good, well at least not nearly as good as the other book by him I read, Boy Meets Boy. But anyways, during the course of the book the older, sterner brother keeps telling his younger, more free-spirited brother to tie up his shoelaces. The younger brother goes on about how much of a pain his older brother is and how he must be embarrassed to be seen with him in public and so on. There’s a scene near the end of a book where they have a fight, and as the younger storms out, the older brother notices his shoelace is untied, and then gets angry at himself for not noticing and then worries that his younger brother will trip over and die and it will be all his fault.
I haven’t explained it too well here, but it’s on page 187 of the book and it was really the only good bit for me.