Favorite passages from books

What book is that?
And I can't think of anything at the moment.

The Kindly Ones, as I said. Written by Jonathan Littell.

Both last pages of Moby-Dick. The one last page and then the last page of the epilogue. Both spine-chilling!

favorite moby dick quote:

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bits and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight! (LVII)

The 'Byron the Bulb' and last few pages of Gravity's Rainbow.
The scene in Lolita with the headmistress talking to Humbert Humbert.
The attempted suicide in 1982, Janine.

Last lines of On the Road.

The Part about Archimboldi in 2666.

I actually like the last scene in "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", the kite thing. And also when he brings the bear to the hospital.

Herzog's Conquest of the Useless is peppered with these amazing non-sequiturs and dream-like lines that blow my mind.

I have been profoundly affected by books, but I am waiting on a book to move me to tears, it hasn't happened yet.

The Superbowl passage in Survivor caught me off guard, so i love that'un too.

Am I the only loonie that types out passages?

Though I guess if everyone did that, this thread could potentially be full of spoilers. [Spoiling endings of books, for example]

On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense -

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened."

The Picture of Dorian Gray -

"There is no such thing as a good influence...All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view...To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us...But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick the longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what it's monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the mind. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also."

Human Moments in World War III -

"It satisfies every childlike curiosity, every muted desire, whatever there is in him of the scientist, the poet, the primitive seer, the watcher of fire and shooting stars, whatever obsessions eat at the night side of his mind, whatever sweet and dreamy yearning he has ever felt for nameless places faraway, whatever earth-sense he possesses, the neural pulse of some wilder awareness, a sympathy for beasts, whatever belief in an immanent vital force, the Lord of Creation, whatever secret harboring of the idea of human oneness, whatever wishfullness and simplehearted hope, whatever of too much and not enough, all at once and little by little, whatever burning urge to escape responsibility and routine, escape his own overspecialization, the circumscribed and inward-spiraling self, whatever remnants of his boyish longing to fly, his dreams of strange spaces and eerie heights, his fantasies of a happy death...all these are satisfied, all collected and massed in that living body, in that sight that he sees from the window."

House Of Leaves -

"In the end, Navidson is left with one page, and one match. For a long time, he waits in the darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip, sparks to life a final ball of light.
First, he reads a few lines by match light, and then as the heat bites his fingertips, he applies the flame to the page. Here then is the end. The final act of reading, the final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep over the text, keep just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then, as the fire retreats, dimming, it's life suddenly spent, the book is gone, leaving nothing behind but invisible words and pages, already dismantled in the dark."

American Psycho

Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obvisouly enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being-- flesh, blood, skin, hair-- but my depersonilization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had ben eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, the rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't put my finger on it.

---

This is what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, or receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathizing, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt any more. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...

The Bell Jar

A keen wind that had been hiding itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot with out which the world would not exist. A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy".

The Rum Diary

"Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words like Love, that I never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

The opening paragraph from Will Christopher Baer's Kiss Me, Judas:

I must be dead for there is nothing but blue snow and the furious silence of a gunshot. Two birds crash blindly against the glass surface of a lake. I'm cold, religiously cold. The birds burst from the water, their wings like silver. One has a fish twisting in its grip. The other dives again and now I hold my breath. Now the snow has stopped and the sky is endless and white and I'm so cold I must have left my body.

it's poetry. what an opening paragraph. it's breath taking.

no doubt about it.

I've loafed around the streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other--hell, you've probably seen me if you've ever been out this way--I've stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn't piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I'm laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people.

You know what I mean--the couples, the men and wives you see walking along together. The tall fat women, and the short scrawny men. The teensy little women, and the big fat guys. The dames with lantern jaws, and the men with no chins. The bowlegged wonders, and the knock-kneed miracles. The . . . I've laughed--inside, that is--until my guts ached. It's almost as good as dropping in on a Chamber of Commerce luncheon where some guy gets up and clears his throat a few times and says, "Gentlemen, we can't expect to get any more out of life than what we put into it . . ." (Where's the percentage in that?) And I guess it--they--the people--those mismatched people--aren't something to laugh about. They're really tragical.

They're not stupid, no more than average anyway. They've not tied up together just to give jokers like me a bang. The truth is, I reckon, that life has played a hell of a trick on 'em. There was a time, just for a few minutes maybe, when all their differences seemed to vanish and they were just what each other wanted; when they looked at each other at exactly the right time in the right place and under the right circumstances. And everything was perfect. They had that time--those few minutes--and they never had any other. But while it lasted . . .

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.

I laughed--I had to laugh or do something worse--and his eyes squeezed shut and he bawled. I yelled with laughter, bending over and slapping my legs. I doubled up, laughing and farting and laughing some more. Until there wasn't a laugh in me or anyone. I'd used up all the laughter in the world.
He got to his feet, smearing his face with his big flabby hands, staring at me stupidly.

You've got no time at all, but it seems like you've got forever. You've got nothing to do, but it seems like you've got everything.
You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven't moved hardly, they've hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they've measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You've got forever, but that's no time at all.
You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.
You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.
You go into the laboratory and start pawing along the rows of bottles and boxes, knocking them on the floor, kicking them, stamping them. You find the bottle of one hundred percent pure nitric acid and you jerk out the rubber cork. You take it into the office and swing it along the rows of books. And the leather bindings begin to smoke and curl and wither--and it isn't good enough.
You go back into the laboratory. You come out with a gallon bottle of alcohol and the box of tall candles always kept there for emergencies. For _emergencies_.
You go upstairs, and then on up the little flight of stairs that leads to the attic. You come down from the attic and go through each of the bedrooms. You come back downstairs and go down into the basement. And when you return to the kitchen you are empty-handed. All the candles are gone, all the alcohol.
You shake the coffee pot and set it back on the stove burner. You roll another cigarette. You take a carving knife from a drawer and slide it up the sleeve of your pinkish-tan shirt with the black bow tie.
You sit down at the table with your coffee and cigarette, and you ease your elbow up and down, seeing how far you can lower your arm without dropping the knife, letting it slide down from your sleeve a time or two.
You think, "_Well how can you? How can you hurt someone that's already dead?_"
You wonder if you've done things right, so's there'll be nothing left of something that shouldn't ever have been, and you know everything has been done right. You know, because you planned this moment before eternity way back yonder someplace.
You look up at the ceiling, listening, up through the ceiling and into the sky beyond. And there isn't the least bit of doubt in your mind. That'll be the plane, all right, coming in from the east, from Fort Worth. It'll be the plane she's on.
You look up at the ceiling, grinning, and you nod and say, "Long time no see. How you been doin' anyway, huh, baby? How are you, Joyce?"

Even though Wu Dawang could see that the bottom of this particular abyss was cushioned with a dense, perfumed carpet of flowers, he feared the lack of restraint with which he was likely to respond, should he permit himself to sink into it.

My Father was a stuffy man.
That is not meant as criticism but rather to be the truth. It is the word that best fit him. Stuffy. He always wore dark suits and ugly ties, and was forever pursing his lips and wrinkling up his forehead before he said anything. "Is that you?" my mother would call when he came home. Then he'd purse his lips and there would go his forehead and after a while he'd say: "Yes, my dear." He always called her that--"my dear"; never her real name, which was Katherine. And I was always Raymond.
It's easiest to begin with my father rather than my mother or Grandmother Rae for the simple reason that I knew less about him than the others. We lived side by side in the same house for many years, but I never really got to know him. That again isn't meant to be criticism; it was just the way things worked out.
Because, in the first place, he was a lot older than I was, being forty when I was born. And he was not the kind who enjoyed walking along the beach or playing catch out in the back yard by the ravine. He was a scholar, and I guess a good one, for he was far and away the most famous person at Athens College in Athens, Illinois, which is where he taught all his life. He got famous because he was an important figure in the Euripides revival that took place in the earlier part of this, the twentieth century, which should go a long way toward explaining how I happened to get stuck with the middle name I unfortunately possess. I suppose he had visions of me becoming a Greek scholar like himself, and if that had happened, my name would have been a winner: Raymond Euripides Trevitt. But such did not turn out to be the case.

The value of life? How could I put a tangible value upon it? Somehow, I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when with Wolf Larsen. I have since determined that a part of it was due to the man's personality, but that the greater part was due to his totally different outlook. Unlike other materialists I had met and with whom I had something in common to start on, I had nothing in common with him. Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity of his mind that baffled me. He drove so directly to the core of the matter, divesting a question always of all superfluous details, and with such an air of finality, that I seemed to find myself struggling in deep water, with no footing under me. Value of life? How could I answer the question on the spur of the moment? The sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic. That it was intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned. But when he challenged the truism I was speechless.

"We were talking about this yesterday," he said. "I held that life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and that living was merely successful piggishness. Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left."

"You have read Darwin," I said. "But you read him misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton destruction of life."

He shrugged his shoulders. "You know you only mean that in relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you destroy as much as I or any other man. And human life is in no wise different, though you feel it is and think that you reason why it is. Why should I be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and without value? There are more sailors than there are ships on the sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines for them. Why, you who live on the land know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain more poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which is life destroyed), than you know what to do with. Have you ever seen the London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?"

He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a final word. "Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large. To himself only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was, being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea- water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don't you see? And what have you to say?"

"That you are at least consistent," was all I could say, and I went on washing the dishes.

But Wolf Larsen was the man-type, the masculine, and almost a god in his perfectness. As he moved about or raised his arms the great muscles leapt and moved under the satiny skin. I have forgotten to say that the bronze ended with his face. His body, thanks to his Scandinavian stock, was fair as the fairest woman's. I remember his putting his hand up to feel of the wound on his head, and my watching the biceps move like a living thing under its white sheath. It was the biceps that had nearly crushed out my life once, that I had seen strike so many killing blows. I could not take my eyes from him. I stood motionless, a roll of antiseptic cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling itself down to the floor.

He noticed me, and I became conscious that I was staring at him.

"God made you well," I said.

"Did he?" he answered. "I have often thought so myself, and wondered why."

"Purpose - " I began.

"Utility," he interrupted. "This body was made for use. These muscles were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that get between me and life. But have you thought of the other living things? They, too, have muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and tear, and destroy; and when they come between me and life, I out-grip them, out-tear them, out-destroy them. Purpose does not explain that. Utility does."

"It is not beautiful," I protested.

"Life isn't, you mean," he smiled. "Yet you say I was made well. Do you see this?"

He braced his legs and feet, pressing the cabin floor with his toes in a clutching sort of way. Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles writhed and bunched under the skin.

"Feel them," he commanded.

They were hard as iron. And I observed, also, that his whole body had unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that muscles were softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along the back, and across the shoulders; that the arms were slightly lifted, their muscles contracting, the fingers crooking till the hands were like talons; and that even the eyes had changed expression and into them were coming watchfulness and measurement and a light none other than of battle.

"Stability, equilibrium," he said, relaxing on the instant and sinking his body back into repose. "Feet with which to clutch the ground, legs to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and hands, teeth and nails, I struggle to kill and to be not killed. Purpose? Utility is the better word."

I did not argue. I had seen the mechanism of the primitive fighting beast, and I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the engines of a great battleship or Atlantic liner.

"The brain," he said at once. "It was those cursed headaches brought it on."

"Symptoms," I said.

He nodded his head. "There is no accounting for it. I was never sick in my life. Something's gone wrong with my brain. A cancer, a tumour, or something of that nature, - a thing that devours and destroys. It's attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell - from the pain."

"The motor-centres, too," I suggested.

"So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here, conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down, breaking bit by bit communication with the world. I cannot see, hearing and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet all the time I shall be here, alive, active, and powerless."

"When you say you are here, I'd suggest the likelihood of the soul," I said.

"Bosh!" was his retort. "It simply means that in the attack on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched. I can remember, I can think and reason. When that goes, I go. I am not. The soul?"

He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the pillow as a sign that he wished no further conversation.

The man of him was not changed. It was the old, indomitable, terrible Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which had once been so invincible and splendid. Now it bound him with insentient fetters, walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from the world which to him had been a riot of action. No more would he conjugate the verb "to do in every mood and tense." "To be" was all that remained to him - to be, as he had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to execute; to think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as ever, but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.

And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust ourselves to his condition. Our minds revolted. To us he was full of potentiality. We knew not what to expect of him next, what fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do. Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work with anxiety always upon us.

Less Than Zero

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire's car. All it comes down to is the fact that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.

The Catcher in the Rye

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.

----

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

The Great Gatsby

This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

---

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Brokeback Mountain

In the end the stud duck refused to let Jacks ashes go. Tell you what, we got a family plot and he's goin in it. Jacks mother stood at the table coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. You come again, she said.

Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie, a few graves bright with plastic flowers, and didn't want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on the grieving plain.

A few weeks later, on a Saturday, he threw all the coffeepots and dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack.

Ennis, what are you lookin for, rootin through them postcards? said Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the garbage can.

Scene a Brokeback Mountain.

Over in Fremont County?

No, north a here.

I didn't order none a them. Let me get the order list. They got it I can get you a hunderd. I got a order some more cards anyway.

Ones enough, said Ennis.

When it came, thirty cents, he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung a wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.

Jack, I swear he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.

Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and buck-toothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you cant fix it you've got to stand it.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you cant fix it you've got to stand it.

I really like this.

AGAINST THE GRAIN
by Joris-krl Huysman

So, in a spirit of hate and scorn of his unhappy boyhood, he had suspended from the ceiling of the room we speak of, a little cage of silver wire in which a cricket was kept prisoner to chirp as they had been used to do in old days among the cinders in the great fireplaces at the Château de Lourps. Whenever he heard this sound, which he had so often listened to on many an evening of constraint and silence in his mother's chamber, all the miseries of a wretched
and neglected childhood would come crowding before the eye of
memory. At such times, roused from his reveries by the
movements of the woman he was fondling mechanically at the
moment and whose words and laughter interrupted his thoughts of the past and recalled him to reality, there as he lay in the pink boudoir, a sudden commotion would shake his soul, a longing for revenge on dreary hours endured in former times, a mad craving to befoul with base and carnal acts his recollections of bygone family life, an overmastering temptation to assuage his lustful propensities
on the soft cushion of a woman's body, to drain the cup of
sensuality to its last and bitterest dregs.

Other times again, when despondency weighed heavy on his spirit, when on rainy Autumn days he felt a sick aversion for everything,-for the streets, for his own house, for the dingy mud-coloured sky, for the stony-looking clouds, he would fly to this refuge, set the cricket's cage swinging gently to and fro and watch its movement repeated ad infinitum in the surrounding mirrors, till at last his eyes would grow dazed and he seemed to see the cage itself at rest, but
all the room tossing and turning, filling the whole apartment with a dizzy whirl of pink walls.

I like this thread. <3 Everybody's posting great stuff.

The Kindly Ones

I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.

__

I knelt near the hole and then slowly stretched up my head; the slit was narrow, I could just see a landscape of shapeless, almost abstract ruins. Then I heard the scream, on the left: a long hoarse cry, suddenly interrupted. Then the scream began again. There was no other noise and I heard it very clearly. It came from a young man, and they were long piercing cries, teriffyingly hollow; he must have been shot in the belly. I leaned forward and looked sideways: I could see his head and part of his torso. He screamed until he was breathless, stopped to breathe in, then began again. Without knowing Russian, I understood what he was shouting: "Mama! Mama!" I couldn't stand it. "What is it?" I stupidly asked Nišić. - "He's one of the guys from before." - "Couldn't you finish him off?" Nišić stared at me with a hard look, full of contempt: "We don't have ammunition to waste," he spat.

EDIT_

in correspondance, in speeches too, passive constructions dominated: "it has been decided that...," "the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment," "this difficult task has been carried out," and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reassuring, and in a way they weren't even actions, since by the special usage that our National Socialist language made of certain nouns, one managed, if not completely to eliminate verbs, at least to reduce them to the state of useless (but nonetheless decorative) appendages, and that way, you did without even action, there were only facts, brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment, like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough), the Verwertung (the utilization), the Entpolonisierung (the de-Polonization), the Ausrottung (the extermination), but also, in a contrary sense, the Versteppung, the "steppification" of Europe by the Bolshevik hordes who, contrary to Attila, razed civilization in order to let the grass grow for their horses.

EDIT_

When You Are Engulfed In FLames. The first book to make me laugh out loud.

"Excuse me," I said, apologizing, basically, for my very existence.
The couple took their seats and, just as I settled in beside them, the man turned to the woman, saying, "I don't want to hear this shit."
I assumed he was continuing an earlier argument, but it turned out he was referring to the Gershwin number the airline had adopted as its theme song. "I can't believe the fucking crap they make you listen to on planes nowadays."
The woman patted her silver hair and agreed, saying that whoever had programmed the music was an asshole.
"A cocksucker," the man corrected her. "A goddamn cocksucking asshole." They weren't loud people and didn't even sound all that angry, really. This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to "I am fucking freezing."
"Me too," her husband said. "It's cold as shit in here." Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit, for how had I so misjudged these people? Why, after all these years, do I still believe that expensive clothing signifies anything more than a disposable income, that tweed and cashmere actually bespeak refinement?

__

The barber was just sitting around watching TV when I entered, and he invited me to set my bags on one of his three empty chairs. He then gestured for me to sit. I did, and as he covered me with a cloth I came to realize that the man had shit on his hands, a swipe or whatever, most likely on the palm. The smell was unmistakable, and every time he raised the scissors I recoiled.

..

It went on like this for twenty minutes, and when he had finished cutting my hair, the barber covered my head with a damp towel. He then proceeded to punch me about the ears. I've gone back and forth on this, wondering if "punch" is too strong a word, but I really don't think it is. He didn't fracture my skull or break any of his knuckles, he never actually drew back his arm, but it really did hurt.
"Hey," I said, but he just laughed and landed another blow above my right mimi. Luckily the towel was there, or in addition to the pain I'd have obsessed about the shit he was pounding into my new haircut. Of course I washed it anyway, twice as a matter of fact. Hugh had his hair cut a few weeks ago, and so I asked if his barber had punched him in the head as well.
"Sure did," he said. So at least that part was normal.

the last page of "lunar park" sorry I dont have it to post like you guys did.But its definatly my favorite passage from any book Ive read.

H.P. Lovecraft - The Picture In The House

Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days, and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

BUMPED! for Timby.

Hmm, I thought she said this one wasn't it in shoutbox.

Ah, shit. Did she? Is this the one you linked, frank? I just assumed it was this one when she mentioned that imke was the thread creator.

Ha, no it's not the one I linked, but she did mention seeing the one I linked and the one Imke created and said niether one was it. Oh well. We tried.

Uuurrgghhk. I read her shout wrong. This thread is great though--Plenty of good excerpts in here.

Rollins is always a punch in the gut to me... Great quote.

Aw, thanks Matty. And you too Frank!

but it's the wrong thread, isn't it?

There's a mess of FRANNY AND ZOOEY quotes on this thread! http://ns2.chuckpalahniuk.net/forum/1000029/a-small-glass-of-ginger-ale-...

Imke, the quotes from The Kindly ones were interesting! I'm not ready for a 900 page book at the moment, but I'll try to remember that one for winter.

oooohh, i love that thread, Mirka! LOVE IT!

Spaz!

forgive my spaztasticness. it is hereditary, like loving [book in discussion] should be.

At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

A word to the wise. To the residents of the Steinplatz telephone area in particular: In the Renaissance Theater, Hardenbergstrasse, the 100th performance of "Coeur-Bube," that charming comedy in which agreeable humor is united with deeper meaning, was given with appropriate honors. The residents of Berlin are urged by means of bill-posters to help this play to reach a still higher commemorable record. We have to consider here, of course, several different things: Collectively, Berliners may be asked to do this, but it may also happen that through various circumstances, they will be prevented from obeying the call. In the first place, they may be away on a trip and so not know anything about the existence of the play. Or, they may be in Berlin, but have no occasion to see the announcement of the play on the poster column, perhaps because they are ill in bed. In a city of four millions, that must apply to a considerable number of people. At any rate, it may be that they are notified through the advertising news of the radio, at 6pm, that "Coeur-Bube," that charming Parisian comedy, in which agreeable humor is united with a deeper meaning, is now being played at the Renaissance Theater for the 100th time. The announcement, however, may have no effect other than to make them regret, for the journey is out of the question, supposing they are really sick abed. According to reliable information, no arrangements have been made in the Renaissance Theater for the reception of sick-beds, which perhaps might be temporarily transported there by ambulances.

Nor can we ignore another possibility: there may be people in Berlin (and there doubtless are such) who read the poster of the Renaissance Theater, but doubt its truth, not the truth of the existence of the poster, but the truth and also the importance of its contents, as reproduced by the printed type. They may read with a feeling of discomfort, disgust, and reluctance, even with anger the statement that the play "Coeur-Bube" is a charming comedy. Whom does it charm, what does it charm, with what does it charm, how do they contrive to charm me, I needn't let myself be charmed. It might cause them to make a wry face when they think that in this comedy agreeable humor is united with a deeper meaning. They do not want agreeable humor, their attitude toward life is serious, their emotional state is sad, but lofty, there having occurred a recent bereavement in their family. Nor will they let themselves be bamboozled by the information that a deeper meaning is connected with this regrettably agreeable humor. For in their opinion agreeable humor can in no case be made innocuous or neutralized. Deeper meaning must always stand alone. Agreeable humor is to be eliminated, as Carthage was eliminated by the Romans, or as the same thing befell other cities, in other ways which they can no longer remember. Some people don't believe at all in the deeper meaning that lies in the play "Coeur-Bube," praised by the poster columns. A deeper meaning: why a deeper and not a deep one? Does deeper mean more deeply than deep? Thus they argue.

It is obvious that in a big city like Berlin, many people doubt a lot of things and carp and cavil considerably. And so it happens that they may also criticize the wording of that poster which has been placed there at such great expense by the producer. As a matter of fact, they are not interested in the theater. And even if they don't carp at it, and even if they loved it, especially the Renaissance Theater in Hardenbergstrasse, and even if they admit that in this play there is a union of agreeable humor with a deeper meaning, they do not want to participate in it simply because they have other plans for tonight. Thus the number of people who will stream towards Hardenbergstrasse, and might perhaps force simultaneous performances of the play "Coeur-Bube" in adjacent theaters, would be considerably diminished.

After this instructive excursion into public and private events in Berlin we will now return, in April 1928, to Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold with his plague of girls. It may be assumed that for this news, too, there exists only a small circle of people who are interested. We prefer not to explain the reasons for this. But this shall not prevent me from following the traces of my little man in Berlin, Center and East; each of us does what to him seems necessary.

~Döblin
Berlin Alexanderplatz

can't say this is my favorite passage ever, but it did make me laugh.

Somebody revived my thread! No way!

Wow, I totally forgot about this quote. That book is amazing.

The two following passages are from Rant The first one I just always found funny, and the second one I've admired because right there I was being told the entire story I was about to read but I still never figured out the ending.

Near as I recollect, Chet and Buddy didn’t start out slow eaters. I trained them that way. It got to be too much, baking a devil’s-​food cake from scratch and watching Chet and Buddy wolf it down in three bites. Two of them hurrying to choke down one slice, then another, until the cake was nothing left but the dirty plate. Even while they’re inhaling my food, they’re talking plans about something next, or reading out of a catalogue, or hearing the news on the radio. Always living months into the future. Miles down the road.
The only exception was any food the two of them put on the table. Anytime Chet shot a goose, we sat there, everyone talking up how good it tasted. Or if Buddy caught a string of trout, again, the family spent all night eating it. ’Course, there’s bones in a trout. In a goose, you figure to look out for steel shot. There’s a price to pay if you don’t pay attention to the food you’re chewing. You get a fish bone in your throat and choke to death, or a sharp bone stabbed through the roof of your mouth. Or you split a back tooth, biting down on bird shot.

My feet, crossed at the ankle, right foot over the left, same as his, I say: Impossible. Not even standby tickets go that cheap. I ask: How’d he get such a deal?

Drinking his whiskey, neat, he says, “First, what you have to do is escape from inside a locked insane asylum.” Then, he says, you have to hitchhike cross-​country, wearing nothing but plastic booties and a paper getup that won’t stay shut in back. You need to arrive about a heartbeat too late to keep a repeat child-​molester from raping your wife. And your mother. Spawned out of that rape, you have to raise up a son who collects a wagonful of folks’ old, thrown-​out teeth. After high school, your wacko kid got’s to run off. Join some cult that lives only by night. Wreck his car, a half a hundred times, and hook up with some kind-​of, sort-​of, not-​really prostitute.
Along the way, your kid got’s to spark a plague that’ll kill thousands of people, enough folks so that it leads to martial law and threatens to topple world leaders. And, lastly, your boy got’s to die in a big, flaming, fiery inferno, watched by everybody in the world with a television set.
He says, “Simple as that.”

The following is, of course, from American Psycho:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago
(probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed - and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing.

From The Rats in the Walls. HP Lovecraft tells it like it is:

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful ways.

And another Lovecraft passage, from The Tomb. This one has always spoken to me in an odd sort of way:

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.

Not really sure of my all time favourite passage, but i recently read Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane, and this passage stuck out and made me chuckle.

"After my daughter was born, I'd considered buying a shotgun too ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as i listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, i thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off."

Time to revive my thread again.

Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas:

The splintered end of her thigh bone is grinding against the metal jammed up to her midriff and I'm getting her blood on my hands trying to shove the damn thing a centimetre away from the wound. Got to maintain the facade though. Her head has lolled backwards and to one side, her terrified eyes on mine, and I nod to reassure her regardless of what I'm thinking.

I kneel again, holding the cold and trembling hands of this young lady, this girl I've never seen before who's becoming quieter by the second, who knows nothing about me. I wonder if I'll be the last person she ever sees. And I wonder if she'll be disappointed.

I will flood this thread with Written On The Body quotes:

Why is the measure of love loss?

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

"You’ll get over it…" It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because "it" is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never loses. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I like those. Especially the last one.

The Absolutist by John Boyne:

'The truth is, Tristan', my father said that day as he steered me carefully out on to the street, his thick fingers pressing tightly on my shoulder blades, 'it would be best for all of us if the Germans shoot you dead on sight.'
The last thing he ever said to me.

I have notebooks full of quotes, I can't even choose. But here are a few from one of my favourite books, Your Name Written On Water by Irene Gonzalez Frei.

It will be a love without time and without screams, without an end and without blood, it will be the love we always pursued and which we only managed to surmise, to brush with our loving fingertips, and we will be worthy of this love. We will see each other once again, face to face, like the night they killed you. I wish this land were light on your open eyes, Marina.

We were two solitary dogs that didn't know how to please one another and had to settle with themselves.

What a good thread. I never noticed it before.

my favorite passages from this year.

From The Bell Jar, (I found the book over all to be meh, but this passage I had to write down)

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

The Great Gatsby

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I ad heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb mans as though there were more stuggling upon them than a whisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

Brave New World

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

There are more, but those are the only one I have within arms reach.

Good ones.

These are from The Fault In Our Stars by John Green. A wonderful and moving book.

I gues I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?
(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)

"All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."

"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

"That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?"

...it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, becasue there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

Nocturne by John Connolly:

I speak as one who loved music. I cannot listen to it now, and the quiet that has taken its place brings me no peace. There is an edge to it, a constant threat of disruption. I keep waiting to hear those sounds again: the lifting of the piano lid, the notes rising from the vibration of the strings, the muffled echo of a false key being struck. I find myself waking in the darkest spell of the night, just to listen, but there is only the threatening stillness.

I hate the silence, but more than that I fear what may disturb it.

Deep Dark Green by John Connolly:

I think of Catherine often, now that the hour of my own passing approaches. I find myself staring at my reflection on the surface of the lake near my home. I throw a stone and watch my face come apart in ripples, one visage briefly becoming many as I am drawn back to the last day that I spent with her. It becomes harder and harder to depart from such places now, for since her death part of me has always been lost in dark water. The pain of the disease that is eating away at my insides is relentless, but I think that I shall not wait for my body to betray me. Instead, I will join her in the depths and hope that she will come to me, her mouth against mine as I breathe my last, and yet I have lived with her loss for so long that the thought of being reunited with her is almost too much to bear.

We sit in the grass and we pull on its blades
But our hands do not bleed.
"There are many things I'd like to do before the fall."
Same here. But I don't know which fall you mean.
Are we in danger? Will we soon part?

From an untitled poem.

Against the deep down pillow, I realized something. Even in grief and loss, I possessed Rowan. She was a presence within me forever. My loneliness would never again be bitter. Over the years she might draft away from me, she might come to condemn the point of passion that had brought her to my arms. She might be lost to me in some other mundane fashion that would wring tears from me all my nights.
But I'd never really lose her. Because I wouldn't lose the lesson of love I'd learned through her. And this she had given me as I had tried to give it to her.

From Blood Canticle by Anne Rice