Graffiti following 9-11:
“Dear God, save us from those who believe in you.”
Sorry. The answer is that:
“It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.”
- Macbeth, William Shakespeare
“I had been many - I was now one - and to me, myself, alone, grey-eyed Athene spoke saying ‘I am Justice, whom you have made both a slave and a whore.’”
Mary Renault - The Last of the Wine. The perfect culmination of a great scene, and one of the best descriptions of the seductiveness of the mob that I’ve ever read.
Excerpt from Locksley Hall
*For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.*
—Tennyson
“You know what they say about sleeping dogs; you can’t trust 'em.” –Oliver Faltz (one of my pseudonyms)
Another one from Lincoln, after the fall of Vicksberg:
“The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
Brevity is key.
I’m with kayT. Can’t even see the other.
Two candidates from the same poem:
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
- Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, 1859
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
More effective when delivered in an oily, effeminate tone:
“Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue shriller than all the music cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak, ‘Caesar’ is turned to hear!”
I want you to remember, Clark…in all the years to come…in your most private moments…I want you to remember…my hand…at your throat…I want…you to remember…the one man who beat you."
Batman to Superman: Dark Knight Returns
From Lords and Ladies.
And as long as we are quoting from the Tao of Pterry:
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.”
“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
And one of my absolute favorites. It’s a quote from an interview, not a book:
“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”
A dynamite list. I especially love, “Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
Has a sort of Jack Handey vibe.
From Good Omens: “He didn’t so much fall as saunter vaguely downward.”
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
— Jefferson, Declaration of Independence’s 1st sentence.
I like it not only for the elegant language but for the sentiment.
This is the sentence that came to mind for me. Here are some others:
“Call me Ishmael.” Moby Dick
“In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job.” Job 1:1
“Bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon. . . . Bright, clear sky, to-day, to-morrow, and for all time to come.” Giants in the Earth O.E. Rolvaag
Interestingly for me the best sentences in my examples are all first sentences of the work. If it starts well, its likely to end well; much like Beethoven’s 5th, or Mahler’s 5th.
Even if it’s more than one sentence (and I haven’t even tried to look it up yet) Rutger Hauer’s death speech in Blade Runner leapt to mind as I read Labor’s post.
And as long as we’re quoting from interviews, we might as well aspire to intellectual honesty by carrying on with the very next thing he said:
Excellent choice. So far this is topping anything I can think of!