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Post by Deleted on Jun 16, 2019 17:41:15 GMT
Kind of inspired by the various favorite scenes/lyrics threads we've got, I'm curious to see what passages you guys love.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Infinite Jest:
"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.
I am in here."
The last line of this one is my favorite ever - four words, and it conveys so many meanings (Hal is physically present in the room...Hal is real ["I'm not just a jock...I think and feel and have opinions about things..."] and "inside" of his body...Wallace is "in" in the book...the first, subtle reference to Hamlet, a response to "Who's there?")
Blood Meridian:
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
Lord of the Flies:
“If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?”
Catcher in the Rye:
“I don't know what the hell I make of it...don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
Cat's Cradle:
“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So, God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God!
I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.”
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 16, 2019 18:00:00 GMT
For Mattsby - has any book ever started (or been?) better? A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley. Now I'm not sure where to cut it off but to say much more would be to merely plagiarize genius and you should read it fanatically, madly, yourselves - preferably in two or three hungover days:
On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196_, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack. |
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Post by ibbi on Jun 16, 2019 19:10:09 GMT
The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.
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Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
dboyle93.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/lgammsga3lfinmcsqge9uprno1_500.jpg
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He woke all night with the cold. He'd rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one."
tomcatintheredroom.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/the-crossing.jpg
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He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. “Damn it,” he sighed. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
He examined the room with the clairvoyance of his last days, and for the first time he saw the truth: the final borrowed bed, the pitiful dressing table whose clouded, patient mirror would not reflect his image again, the chipped porcelain washbasin with the water and towel and soap meant for other hands, the heartless speed of the octagonal clock racing towards the ineluctable appointment at seven minutes past one on his final afternoon of December 17. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.
www.bookstellyouwhy.com/pictures/15228.jpg
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The looks women throw out are like the moving parts of certain machines that look innocuous enough but are deadly. You go past the machinery every day quietly and with impunity, and without suspecting a thing. There even comes a time when you forget the thing is there. You come and go, you daydream, you talk, you laugh. Then suddenly you feel yourself caught. It's all over. The machinery has you in its grip, you have been seized by a glance. It has caught you, no matter how, or by what means, latching on to some trailing thought or some momentary distraction. You are lost. You will be sucked in, body and soul. A train of mysterious forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain. No one can help you now. You are going to drop from one cog to the next, from one trap to the next, from one anguish to the next, from one torture to the next, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul, and, depending on whether you are in the power of a nasty piece of work or a noble creature, you will not emerge from this terrifying machine except disfigured by shame or transfigured by passion.
pictures.abebooks.com/DORLEYHOUSEBOOKS/22487141050.jpg
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Indeed, Hans Castorp definitely, wilfully purposed that she should know something, or even a good deal. We say wilfully because his eyes were open, he was aware that reason and good sense were against it. But when a man is in Hans Castorp's state - or the state he was beginning to be in - he longs, above all, to have her of whom he dreams aware that he dreams, let reason and common sense say what they like to the contrary. Thus are we made.
d1nmq8yw1yjo7e.cloudfront.net/images/covers/300/9780749386429.jpg
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Post by Deleted on Jun 16, 2019 20:46:51 GMT
Pacinoyes' pick reminded me of another legendary one (also featuring sports obsession and the depressing reality of the American Dream), from DeLillo's Underworld:
"I’ll tell you what I long for...the days of disarray, when I didn’t give a damn or a fuck or a farthing. I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself."
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 16, 2019 21:08:32 GMT
Here's one from my 2nd favorite book - I had posted once about the translations in this text - I think me and Cake talked about it - and how they alter things in fascinating ways, Camus' The Stranger - this is from the more recently translated text by Matthew Ward (Stuart Gilbert's translation here at least is more straightforwardly prosaic). In this version this text to me is beautiful and achingly poetic - I'm afraid one day some French person will tell me it's not even close 
Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something has changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day...........as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent. |
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Post by countjohn on Jun 16, 2019 22:28:32 GMT
Zamyatin's We is well known but not as well known as it deserves to be. It's the father of 1984 and Brave New World. I'm not the kind of person who makes notes in novels but this is one exception, my copy is all marked up and I made notes to remember the page numbers of certain passages.
I 100% agree with this but it understandably did not go well with the authorities in Zamyatin's native USSR.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 17, 2019 0:50:21 GMT
An underrated bit of brilliance from Gravity's Rainbow:
"Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be heard approaching, still impossible to see, but real, and inevitable. And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows...all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left...or never even arrived...and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? And what was that thud, so stiffened and so mute?"
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Post by Mattsby on Jun 17, 2019 2:05:49 GMT
For Mattsby - has any book ever started (or been?) better? A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley. Now I'm not sure where to cut it off but to say much more would be to merely plagiarize genius and you should read it fanatically, madly, yourselves - preferably in two or three hungover days:
On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196_, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.Toooo much to quote from A Fan's Notes you're right. Some other openings I love, Darconville's Cat opening line is perfectly concise: "Darconville, the schoolmaster, always wore black." And shout out Viced fave The Last Good Kiss: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” Back to the Exley. It has my all-time favorite ending line that I won't quote.... but I willl quote a longer passage: “Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the neat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men’s grief, and burdened even further by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls. And always in this horror, this gaggle of femininity, there comes the vision of another girl, now only a little less featureless than all the rest. She came across the campus straight at me, and though I had her in the range of my vision for perhaps a hundred feet, I was only able, for the fury of my heart, to give her five or six frantic glances. . . . I wanted to look. I couldn’t look. I had to look. I could give her only the most gaspingly quick glances. Then she was by me. Waiting as long as I dared, I turned and she was gone.” and a shorter one bc it's Father's Day apt and for me was the most emotional moment in the book: “Be happy and tell my sons that I was a drunk, a dreamer, a weakling, and a madman, anything but that I did not love them.” |
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Post by Deleted on Jun 17, 2019 3:39:27 GMT
Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
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Post by Deceit on Jun 17, 2019 12:41:11 GMT
Suicide, by Édouard Levé
“You were said to have died of suffering. But there was not
as much sadness in you as there is now in those who
remember you. You died because you searched for
happiness at the risk of finding the void.”
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
“Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in the square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”
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