Favorite passages from books

I've never heard of The Fault In Our Stars until now Fano, but I'm glad you posted those.

Wishlisted.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.

From "10 Indians" by Ernest Hemingway

Brother Odd by Dean Koontz:

In the summer of the previous year , when gunmen stormed the mall in Pico Mundo, I had heard so many screams that I hoped my ears would fail me thereafter. Forty-one innocent people had been shot. Nineteen perished. I would have traded music and the voices of my friends for a silence that would exclude for the rest of my life all human cries of pain and mortal terror.
We so often hope for the wrong things, and my selfish hope was not fulfilled. I am not deaf to pain or blind to blood-or dead, as for a while I might have wished to be.

Callisto by Torsten Kroll:

He stood over me smoking his cigarette while he talked, even flicked his ash down into the hole next to me, which made me want to sling a shovel of dirt up at him for payback, only you can’t do stuff like that to a cop even if he’s a rookie.

Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry:

I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself — simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby:

It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.

That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity – the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don’t attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.

The Rum Diary

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.

Life by Keith Richards

It was very like a drug. In fact a far bigger drug than smack. I could kick smack, I couldn’t kick music. One note leads to another, you never quite know what’s going to come next…you don’t want to. It’s like walking on a beautiful tight rope.

I do want to contribute to this thread but I've been having a mental block.

I really like the fry and kroll passages. I am not familiar with their work

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Orson Welles: The Stories of his Life by Peter Conrad
~discussing Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince

On his diminutive private star, the little prince can enjoy as many sunsets as he wishes in a day, simply by adjusting his angle of vision. Welles shared the prince's universality, and the stories he liked were about characters whose stamping ground was the entire earth: Phileas Fogg systematically circumnavigating the planet in Around the World in 80 Day (which Welles staged in 1946), Ahab more frantically pursuing the whale across two hemispheres in Moby Dick (which he also staged in 1955), or Harry Lime who recovers from his death in Vienna and resurfaces all over the map in a radio series that Welles narrated during the 1950s. But for Welles, globe-trotting required more of an effort than it did for Saint-Exupery's prince, who only needs to move his chair. He was always rushing to catch planes or trains, generally with creditors or tax inspectors or irate wives and mistresses on his trail, and he often arrived at the airport or the station too late.

"Who but a madman careth what a madman saith? - Sancho Panza - Don Quixote

Don't be afraid. Don't be. I am.

House of Leaves

I've just passed that one! I had no idea about the Long S thing, I had to google it. Though there was a time I wrote my f's like one would do S's.

Shantaram.

'You should've insisted that he go to a hospital!' I snapped at Johnny Cigar. 'This is ridiculous!'
'You're doing very excellent sewing, Lin,' he countered. 'You could make up a very fine shirt, with stitches like that.'
'It's not as good as it should be. He'll have a big scar. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here.
'Are you having trouble with toilet, Lin?'
'What?'
'Are you not going to toilet? Are you having it hard motions?'
'For Chrissakes, Johnny! What are you babbling about?'
'Your bad temper, Lin. This is not your usual behaviour. Maybe it is a problem with hard motions, I think so?'
'No,' I groaned.
'Ah, then it is loose motions you're having, I think.'

'It is a very fine thing that you have done tonight, Linbaba,' Prabaker gushed. 'A man must love his bear. That is what they said, those bear-handling fellows, and you have made it come true. It is a very, very, very fine thing that you have done.'
We woke a sleeping cab driver outside the police station, on Colaba Causeway. Prabaker joined me in the back seat, enjoying the chance to play tourist in one of the cabs he frequently drove. As the taxi pulled out from the kerb, I turned to see that he was staring at me. I looked away. A moment later, I turned my head and found that he was still staring. I frowned at him, and he wagged his head. He smiled his world-embracing smile for me, and placed his hand over his heart.
'What?' I asked irritably, although his smile was irresistible, and he knew it, and I was already smiling with him in my heart.
'A man...' he began, intoning the words with sacramental solemnity.
'Not again, Prabu.'
'...must love his bear,' he concluded, patting at his chest and wagging his head frantically.
'Oh, God help me,' I moaned, turning again to look at the awkward stir and stretch of the waking street.

I never really understood why but i always loved this final passage of 1984:

The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work.

One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

He loved Big Brother.