Share a line or passage from your current book, part 3

Just thought part 2 was getting a bit unwieldy, and to be honest, I wanted to try out my linking ability. It's not pretty, but it worked! I will work on the pretty part of it next. Thanks moibilo.......

Good idea hemlokgang. If anyone's interested, the earlier post is here: Share a line or passage from your current book, part 2

From King Leopold's Ghost, a nonfiction history of Congo. This is about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

"High School teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to so in terms of Freud, Jung and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place. Two of the three times the story was filmed, most notably in Francis Ford Coppola's Appocalypse Now, it was not even set in Africa. But Conrad himself wrote, "Heart of Darkness is experience...pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."

"Luis Del Mora never uttered another word. Two close-range, silenced shots from a .22 Magnum pistol jutting from the vehicle's window made certain of that. One bullet ripped apart his windpipe, ultimately lodging deep in his cervical spine. The other shattered the delicate cherubic bone of his forehead before gyrating end over end through his brain. There would be no more words, no more book sales, and no more four-inch-thick wads of money for Luis Alejandro Del Mora."

From The Fourth Perspective by Robert Greer, an ER book.

"Oh, you're a writer?"

"Yes," our Easterner replies, trying to sound like a modest and well brought-up person who does not want to humiliate those who have not been chosen.

"What a coincidence! Our ten-year-old daughter is just finishing a novel. We even have a publisher!"

..."Alchemy", Thank You for Not Reading - Dubravka Ugresic

"The world is a bridge; pass over it but build no house on it."

"For a woman like myself revenge is an unattainable luxury, like partridges or childhood."

"Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough."

Just a few of my favorites from The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

" 'One pretty woman means fun at the dance. Two pretty women means trouble in the house. Three pretty women mean run for the hills.' " He gave Nynaeve an even tighter smile than her own.

"My da used to say that. You're up to something Nynaeve. You are all smiling like cats staring at a finch caught in a thornbush, and I think I am the finch."

From The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan.

"After all, we're stuck in our skulls for the whole four-score sentence of sentience."

The Canon, Natalie Angier

"My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I like all the time.

I am a crazy woman....That last part is true."

first line of The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Bet that makes you want to read it, huh?

#6: I love The Wheel of Time! Mat Cauthon is amazing.

I think Shakespeare needs a few lines, so here's a passage that I fell in love with and memorized as a senior in high school. Obviously not my current book, but I hope you'll all forgive me. And please forgive my punctuation problems, I memorized the spoken words, not the written ones.

"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed, this goes so heavily with my dispostion that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire --- why it appears to me a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the earth! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."

Hamlet in Hamlet. Act III, Scene III, I believe.

belinthesun - I'm impressed you memorize that whole excerpt! Thanks for the post.

thanks! i did another one from The Merchant of Venice, but it's not as long or famous.

mmm, and now that i reread it, i seem to have gotten something wrong. "why it appears to me a foul and..." should be "why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and..." i always screw that part up. and i think "faculty" might be "facilities." another thing i can't quite remember. but it still basically means the same thing.

"Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common."
-David Sedaris, "Dinah the Christmas Whore," Holidays on Ice p.89

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."

This may be my favorite line from this book. And I hardly feel I need to say which book it is . . .

But for any other beings from another planet who, like me, have never read this book before, it's The Hobbit.

re: the Jack the Ripper murders and the efforts of the constabulary

"Naturally, I suppose, the murderer knew the time of the policeman's beat, and waited till he had passed. Some sensible fellow thought of making the police more stealthy by putting india-rubber on their heels; and it was this that started the widespread use of rubber-heels by the public at large."

M.V. Hughes, A London Girl of the 1880s, pp. 218-19

I'm sure there were other factors that caused the popularity of rubber soles to rise, but this just fascinated me, and I had to share it.

#14: Interesting, and something that would never have crossed my mind. Who knew sneakers would be such a boon to the criminal class?

“The media, television in particular, transforms events into entertainment, simply because entertainment, and not information, has become the main engine of the mass media.” (“War is War, but Intellectuals are Only Human”, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic)

>8 booklady, Will. You. Stop. Pimping. That. Book. Until. I . Can. Get. It. PLEASE?

Thanks, love you, mean it

Maybe it's kind of long, but this description of the winter battlefield of Stalingrad from Life and Fate almost gives me the shivers.

"As it grew warmer, big flakes of snow settled on the ground, on the red brick-dust, on the crosses of the graves, on the turrets of abandoned tanks, in the ears of dead men waiting to be buried.

"The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.

"The snow fell on Bach's shoulders: it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.

"This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future."

#17 richardderus--ditto we can't get it til it comes out on 7/29==2 more days. I can't wait. I've heard such great reviews of that book. I wasn't lucky enough to get an ARC. The Gargoyle is another one that I can't wait to get on 8/5. Anyone read it yet?

>19

Ah, I was just popping over to leave you all with a quote from The Gargoyle. I'm almost done with it and completely in love.

"While it is true that outside the library I have lived a life of wickedness, inside it I've always been as devoted to knowledge as a saint to his Bible."
-Andrew Davidson, "The Gargoyle" p.13

“If you were an atheist, Birbal,” the emperor challenged his first minister, “what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?” Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, “I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them.” “How so?” the emperor asked. “All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,” said Birbal, “and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.”

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Fabulous, MobileMaker! I absolutely loved that book. Did you as well?

hemlogang: Yes, I liked it a lot. It was my first Rushdie, and a little more fantastical than I expected. But I plan to read another soon, perhaps Satanic Verses.

Tom

momom248: The Gargoyle is fantastic. I'm giving away my ARC as a contest on my blog Good luck!

richard: I'm sorry I can't stop talking about The Lace Reader...it's so lovely, and you can get it tomorrow...so just deal with it :)

>24 booklady, how perfectly craptastic of you to remind me that I have to wait another day and then some for the Big Brown Sleigh to bring me The Lace Reader. Mr. Man is taking me for outpatient surgery tomorrow, and has laready made my copy of it a next-day delivery to arrive tomorrow. Just found out. He's great.

from Hedge of Mist

"I felt a short sharp flare of utterly unreasonable annoyance. Supper! Please! I wished only to go on reading all night, all next day, that was the only hunger I needed to feed just now. "

...wait a minute. I have to go order a copy of Thank you for Not Reading. Okay. I'm back.

and from Hard Freeze

""I want that forty-five back," she said, speaking to the cold breath of the wall. "It has sentimental value. I shot my first husband in Sicily with it.""

"His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills, but would be done up without Dedlocks."

from Bleak House. I'd forgotten how much fun Dickens can be

Clueless: That's a great passage! I think I'll pick up a copy of Hard Freeze. I've not encountered Dan Simmons, even though I love crime novels.

Tom

I might do the same. I loved Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, also by Dan Simmons, although they're sci fi rather than crime.

What a great thread! I can't pick one, so I'll share a few from Lighthousekeeping:

"They say you can tell something of a person's life by observing their body. This is certainly true of my dog. My dog has back legs shorter than his front legs, on account of always digging in at one end, and always scrambling up at the other." (5)

"A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method." (23)

" 'Tell me a story, Pew.'
'What kind of story, child?'
'A story with a happy ending.'
'There's no such thing in all the world.'
'As a happy ending?'
'As an ending'. " (49)

I *love* Jeanette Winterson. Her books Oranges are not the Only Fruit and The World and Other Places are just as charming, too. I bet they all are.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

"Aryed had just a few seconds to feel the exquisite pleasure-pain to which he was enslaved. The card that had cost him the purse was an eight. The round vowels of the word 'otto' seemed to fall from the Barnabot's lips and merge with the curved infinity symbol of the number itself, elongating into a tunnel that seemed to suck the soul from the rabbi."

From The Death of Literature by Alvin Kernan:

"The death of literature looks like the twilight of the gods to conservatives or the fall of the Bastille of high culture to radicals, but my argument is, to put it simply, that we are watching the complex transformations of a social institution in a time of radical political, technological, and social change."

“At times the earth’s fate seems so dire and inexorable that I’m tempted to throw up my hands and say to hell with it. The forces driving the sixth extinction* possess so much money and power that fighting them requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The odds are so long that if you look at them too hard you’ll lose your mind. Every once in a while, though, I meet a rare subspecies of human who offers hope. It’s almost never a politician or a scientist. It’s almost always a woman without credentials. They’re often self-taught researchers who become experts through years of hard experience and close observation. They’re the ones who scoop up a jar of brown water from a ditch and ask impertinent questions about what’s in it. Because they don’t know protocol they barge in and do what nobody else has the courage to do. They don’t ask permission. When government authorities demand to know what gives them the right to speak, they don’t flash advanced degrees. They straighten their shoulders and say, I have the right because I walk on this earth and I breathe this air.”

- Bruce Barcott in The Last Flight of the Macaw, page 8.

* Barcott presents arguments that the current rate of extinction is on a similar scale to the five major extinction events in the geologic record. These are in the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous periods.

"The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of Deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice."

- Ted Chiang, "Story of Your Life" in Stories of Your Life and Others

This short story blew me away. Wow.

"Anthony Newnham, by contrast, was a Byronic Englishman who, in the fullness of time, married something like nine women; these unions produced I don't know how many children. With the onset of pregnancy Anthony's interest in a given wife was likely to go into sharp decline."

From Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry.

"Outside the dreams, outside the walls, the city Rákava stood still in the daybreak. The streets, the old wall wth its high gates and towers, the factories that bulked outside the wall, the gardens at the high south edge of town, the whole of the long, tilted plain on which the city was built, lay pale, drained, unmoving. A few fountains clattered in deserted squares. The west was still cold where the great plain sloped off into the dark. A long cloud slowly dissolved into a pinkish mist in the eastern sky, and then the sun's rim, like the lip of a cauldron of liquid steel, tipped over the edge of the world, pouring out daylight."

From "Conversations at Night," Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. LeGuin

Lovely, richardderus!

>38 hemlok, you're back! Where you been hidin' yourself?

richardderus, you mentioned in one of your posts this last week (of course I cannot find it) an author who I believe was a French name (could be totally off on that) that you highly recommended. Can you let me know who it is? Thank you.

Good luck w/ your move--its coming up soon isn't it?

>40 momom, Thanks for the moving mojo! It's going to be delayed a few days, so not until next Saturday the 16th. I hate waiting.

The author I mentioned is Ursula K. LeGuin from above, I think. Another author I recommended...? Not leaping to mind.

Richardderus, I spent a week hosting two German teenagers and doing a whirlwind tour of NYC and Wash DC..........they are still with me for two more weeks and so my LT time is limited.....thanks for noticing.

>42 hemlok, That sounds a widge stressful...but glad it's approaching an end. You're very generous to do that! See more of you after you're guestless. We do notice and miss the absentees on the threads, of course. I figure we all have adult lives and are just about full-up no matter what, so I don't want to sound like a worrywart. Just nice to see a friendly cyber-face again!

richard thanks so much for the author info above. I will check it out. Also like you I will be moving next Fri. but at my workplace--our entire office is moving into a new town--oh the packing!!

From Each of Us is a Book by David Drake:

Don't Bank on It

If banks were keen on service
And cared about us, too,
They'd open nights and weekends
The way libraries do.

From A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson.

"The upshot of all is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand."

#46 boekenwijs - I just love Bryson's books! I've already read Short History twice and am sure I'll re-read it in the next year or so.

From The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, an ARC:

"The day had been so very lovely, the summering shades of plant and rock and sky showing the goodness, the reasonability of order, from the Master's hand. And yet with a shifting of sunlight, I had seen, as though looking into a killing pond, that beyond the restive landscape of the living, the Master stood poised, razor in hand, to cut and scrape away our delicate flesh, leaving only bone and weathered shell."

I like this opening part:

"Detective Joseph Shanahan hated rain. He hated it about as much as he hated dirt-bag criminals, slick defense lawyers, and stupid geese. The first were scum, the second bottom feeders, the third an embarrassment to the bird family in general".

"It Must be Love" by Rachel Gibson.

From Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."

From Earth Abides by George R. Stewart:

"In those days when there had been death even in the air and civilization tottered towards its end--in those days, the men who controlled the flow of the water looked at one another and said, 'Even though we fall sick and die, still, the people must have water.' And they thought of plans that they had laid carefully in those times when men feared that bombs would fall. Then they set the valves and opened the channels, so that the water flowed freely all the way from the great dams in the mountains and through the long siphons and into the tunnels and finally to the reservoirs from which it would flow, all at the pull of the earth, through all the faucets. 'Now,' they said, 'when we are gone, the water will flow on--yes, until the pipes rust out, and that will be the time of a generation!' Then they died. But they died as men who have finished their work and lie down quietly, secure in their honor."

Itals from the original. Best plague novel I've ever read!

"The apartment that had once been pleasant was dirty and bleak. It was like the club-houses that children make for themselves, in which the tables and chairs do actually function but are also symbols of tables and chairs."

-- From the story "On Being a Son" by George Dennison, from his collection A Tale of Pierrot and other Stories.

>51 jk, the tables and chairs do actually function but are also symbols of tables and chairs

How vividly precise an image that is. Thanks! I should go find this collection. Never heard of Dennison before.

"The fact is, sir, my Betsy, who is a hot-blooded, affectionate lass, hath the bad luck to be married, and that to a lackluster chilly fellow whose only passions are ambition and miserliness, and who, though he'd like a sturdy son to bring home extra wages, is as sparing with caresses as with coins. Such a money-grubber is he that, after a day's work as a clerk's apprentice in the Customs-House, he labors half the night as a fiddler in Locket's to put by an extra crown, with the excuse 'tis a nest egg against the day she finds herself with child. But 'sblood, 'tis such a tax on his time that he scarce sees her from one day to the next and on his strength that he hath not the wherewithal to roger what time he's with her! It seemed a sinful waste to me to see, on the one hand, poor Betsy alone and all a-fidget for want of husbanding, and on the other her husband Ralph a-hoarding money to no purpose, and so like a Samaritan I did what I could for the both of 'em: Ralph fiddled and I diddled."

From The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth.

#52 > rd, I had never heard of him before, either. I picked this collection up basically at random the other day. The first story, whence came the quote above, was good but not great. It takes the character too many places, for me. I guess I prefer more compact settings, generally speaking, for short stories. At any rate, here's another good quote from the story, one that's particularly apt for LT:

"He began to feel panicky. He stood up and walked away in the direction of his own neighborhood. There were many books he wanted to read. Why was he not reading them? In order to read a book, one had to sit down somewhere, probably at home, and let go of the craving for love, and let the sunlight finally pale at the window."

"Naturally, I suppose, the murderer knew the time of the policeman's beat, and waited till he had passed. Some sensible fellow thought of making the police more stealthy by putting india-rubber on their heels; and it was this that started the widespread use of rubber-heels by the public at large."

Maybe not. The victims themselves were engaged in illegal activity. They may have been the ones with the knowledge of the police beats. Annie Chapman in particular may have had a hand in her own death by leading Jack to a place she knew they wouldn't be interrupted.

"I wanted happy endings in those days, and happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked and going to sleep during the rampages."

From The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

“In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock on a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washed over her.” From A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

edited to fix typos

akeela, I remember that line..........fabulous!

"It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press."

From The Sex Lives of Cannibals, which I just can't seem to finish. This is one of the few passages that actually made me smirk, just a little.

O'Meara leaned in. "You're not your father, son."
Danny stared back at him, unsure.
"Your heart is purer than his."
Danny couldn't speak.
O'Meara squeezed his arm just above the elbow. "Don't sell that, son. You can't ever buy it back in the same condition."

From The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

"There were birds all around him, though, pecking at the grass, and it took him a moment to realize what they were doing: they were searching for his tooth so that they could swallow it...pry it from consecrated ground and take it into the dark furnaces of their stomachs so that it would never be returned to him."

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

Page 111 of an ARC my brother had lying around, and I vacuumed up to give a chance read to; it's not that great, but I liked the line about the dark furnaces of their stomachs a lot for some reason.

#57 akeela - How funny, I chose the same line from that book way back when (Part 2; message #86 - here). You have great taste in lit! ;)

Thanks, Daniel :)

>58 hemlokgang, isn’t it! I preferred The Kite Runner but don’t have a copy handy for a quote…

From two books I've been reading.

The first is a seen from Sweetsmoke by David Fuller, an early review book. Fuller is a screenwriter, and I think that shows here. For context, this is during the American Civil War.

He entered the cornfield at the same time as two Union Soldiers. The stalks reached over his head, and he was comforted by the familiar crop. He waded deeper and found the corn ripe. Faced with this bounty, he became choosy and moved from one stalk to the next. He was dimly aware of a handful of others wandering nearby. He glanced at them in their dark blue coats and saw eyes glazed with fatigue, rifles carried in the crooks of their elbows. The morning fog kept him from seeing more than a few feet in any direction, as if swathed in a cloud. He moved slowly under the not unpleasant burden of sleeplessness. His fingers tested the sheathed, unpicked corn until he hit upon a substantial ear and twisted it free. It was satisfyingly plump in his palm. The drowsy corn stalks rustled. The fog would burn off, the day would be hot, and the predawn rain would bring humidity, but for now he was content. He took hold of the corn silk at the top of the ear and pulled down to reveal nubs perfectly aligned. He smiled, looked at his neighbor to share the perfection, and saw the closest man wore a gray jacket. Cassius hesitated, knowing something was out of place, and it was a moment before he identified what it was. He looked back at a blue coat a few feet away, and the blue had not seen the gray, just as the gray was unaware of the blue.

The second is from To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck. It made me laugh. The context in circa 1900 Monterey, California.

Elizabeth heard Joseph’s voice on the porch and hurried upstairs so she could come down again. She was afraid of Joseph Wayne. Since his last visit she had thought of him nearly all the time. How could she refuse to marry him even though she hated him? Some terrible thing might happen if she should refuse – he might die; or perhaps he might strike her with his fist. In her room, before she went down to the parlor, she brought out all her knowledge to protect her – her algebra and when Ceasar landed in England and the Nicene council and the verb être. Joseph didn’t know things like that. Probably the only date he knew was 1776. An ignorant man, really. Her mouth pinched at the corners with contempt. Her eyes grew stern. She would put him in his place as she would a smart-alec boy in school. Elizabeth ran her fingers around her waist, inside her skirt, to make sure that her shirt-waist was tucked in. She patted her hair, rubbed her lips harshly with her knuckles to bring the blood to the surface, and last, blew out the lamp. She came majestically into the parlor where Joseph stood.
“Good evening.” she said. “I was reading when they told me you were here. Pippa Passes, Browning. Do you like Browning, Mr Wayne?"

Daniel, nice one from Steinbeck :)

From Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, set in colonial Rhodesia in the ‘60s:

"Beside Nyasha I was a paragon of feminine decorum, principally because I hardly ever talked unless spoken to, and then only to answer with the utmost respect whatever question had been asked. Above all, I did not question things. It did not matter to me why things should be done this way rather than that way. I simply accepted that this was so. I did not think that my reading was more important than washing the dishes, and I understood that panties should not be hung to dry in the bathroom where everybody could see them … I was not concerned that freedom fighters were referred to as terrorists, did not demand proof of God’s existence nor did I think that the missionaries, along with all the other Whites in Rhodesia, ought to have stayed at home. As a result of all these things that I did not think or do, Babamukuru thought I was the sort of young woman a daughter ought to be and lost no opportunity to impress this point of view upon Nyasha."

"Toward the end of January the sea was growing harsh, it was beginning to dump its heavy garbage on the town, and a few weeks later everything was contaminated with its unbearable mood."

from The Sea of Lost Time by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Since I've left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this–how a big part of any life is about the hows and the whys of setting up machinery. It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes. Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone."
-Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts p.101-102

(I love this thread!)

from Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street;

"Such stories, if they are good, lead us into the solemn presence of some truth, which we enjoy illicitly, not having paid the heavy price out of our hearts, in their most secret gleanings, the precious and irredeemable treasure of our dreams."

From Les Liaisons Dangereuses:

...Then I knew love...Devoured by a love without hope, I implore your pity and I meet only with your hate: with no other happiness than that of seeing you, my eyes seek you in spite of myself, and I tremble to meet your gaze...

The Vilcomte de Valmont to the Presidente de Trouvel

We move out to the apartment courtyard, where the wet grass licks our bare feet with a thousand hungry tongues.

As She Grows by Lesley Anne Cowan

you gotta love that, jacx!

I'll share the next paragraph of the book I'm currently reading.

"Oh, yes, Driscol's alive, I'd say." Robert Ross looked at the teapot and decided he'd had enough for the moment. He'd learned to ignore the demands of his bladder, up to a point, over the year of campaigning. But once he reached that point he'd have no choice but to leave the square for a time. Something he couldn't imagine doing while those ragging sounds kept coming from the south.
The battle down there was reaching a climax.

72: akeela...I just read this line the other night and I swear I felt every wet tongue of grass on my feet in my own livingroom. I am a sucker for desciptive lines.

Jacqueline B

"There's such a difference between hope and expectation. At first I believed it was a question of duration, that hope was awaiting something further away. I was wrong. Expectation belongs to the body, whereas hope belongs to the soul. That's the difference. The two converse and excite or console each other but the dream of each one is different. I've learnt something more. The expectation of a body can last as long as any hope. Like mine expecting yours."

From A to X: A Story in Letters by John Berger

"All families have skeletons in their closets," she says. "We just happen to have a whole graveyard under our basement."

As She Grows by Lesley Anne Cowen

From The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah:
"The house had a presence, a sense of faded grandeur. Like an old society belle, it was run down and wrinkled, but it had lived. You could imagine the history, the parties, the secrets. It must sound absurd, but I felt an energy from the first moment, almost as if it knew I was there."

As She Grows by Lesley Anne Cowen

You used to dip and turn and swim in my stomach, but now your kicks are purposeful underneath my ribs, as if you are trying to break out of me. As if you are done with what my body has to offer. I reach down and feel the outline of what I think is your foot, hard and buried, like under a thick blanket. You respond to my touch with more kicks, and I quickly pull my hand away, terrified of this conversation. Terrified that you will be disappointed with empty words and the resentful stroke of my finger

Helen of Troy by Margaret George

In the past ten days, something alarming had become clear: I hated to be touched. I had never realized that before, as anyone touching me had done so only in a passing manner. Even my mother, when she embraced me, did not linger, nor did she invade my person. My attendants, when I bathed, averted their eyes and used spnonges to apply the perfuned oil and olive oil to rub on my back afterward. My brothers draped their arms carelessly over my shoulders, but only lightly, and only for a moment.

"Where would you like to go?" asked Mother while we waited for Dad to procure Albuquerque Santos's coveted concentrate. It was evening, the hills of the city sparkled, the windowed shops and cafes and taverns glowed. Psychedelic pop, sounding vaguely French, drifted from upper-floor apartments. The people walked fast and did not speak to us. I pointed to a softly lit place, where the silhouettes inside remained still or moved only in small increments-turn a page, pull a volume from the shelf, examine its front then back, replace it. A bookstore.
"There," I answered, still pointing.

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, David Bajo

I enjoy all sorts of books preferably harder stuff but Jane Austen is a sweetie and really enjoying Mansfield Park where girls were still girls picking roses and being all feminine and flirty. Hasnt the world evolved so much now. I must say I enjoy the evolvement part without the evil and crime that goes with it. Here's a cute one.

"It is a pleasure to see a lady with such a good heart for riding!" said he. " I never see one sit a horse better. She did not seem to have a thought of fear. Very different from you, miss, when you first began, six years ago come next Easter. Lord bless me! how you did tremble when Sir Thomas forst had you put on!

Sweet and quaint - Mansfield Park by Jane Austen -

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

"How despicably have I acted!" she cried. "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! - I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust. How humiliating is this discovery! - Yet, how just a humiliation! - Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly, Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintace, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself."

#49 Walden sends shivers down my spine. Great line!

Just finished The Maytrees and there are some wonderful lines in it. But the two that resonated most for me (for different reasons and, surprisingly given that it is Annie Dillard, not for their poetry) were the following:

"Lasting love is an act of will."

"Everyone envied her the time she had, not noting that they had equal time."

Two passages from The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

1.
Let me begin with a description of her hair – because, really, it would be impossible to start with anything else. Her hair was like Tartarean vines that grow in the night, reaching up from a place so dark that the sun is only a rumor. It spread wildly everywhere, dark curls so cascadingly alluring that they looked as if they would swallow your hand if you were lucky enough to run your fingers through them. Her hair was so outlandish that even now, years later, I am compelled to create these ridiculous metaphors, which I know I’ll regret in the morning.

2.
I once knew a woman who liked to imagine Love in the guise of a sturdy dog, one that would always chase down the stick after it was thrown and return with his ears flopping around happily. Completely loyal, completely unconditional. And I laughed at her, because even I knew that love is not like that. Love is a delicate ting that needs to be cosseted and protected. Love is not robust and love is not unyielding. Love can crumble under a few harsh words, or be tossed away with a handful of careless actions. Love isn’t a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur.
Yes, that is exactly what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear.

(ETA - The last sentence is still part of the excerpt, just the next paragraph.)

#85 dchaikin - I love your last reflection. I don't think you'll laugh when I say that I have always thought of love like the two monkeys that quietly huddle tightly in the corner together, frightened as they watch the other monkeys swing and play and make loud noise .

And I have finished Little Women again.

So, I'll add onto the love theme from Jo, you know, the one that never fit in.

"Ah! Thou gifest me such hope and courage, and I haf nothing
to gif back but a full heart and these empty hands," cried the
Professor, quite overcome.

Jo never, never would learn to be proper, for when he said
that as they stood upon the steps, she just put both hands into
his, whispering tenderly, "Not empty now," and stooping down,
kissed her Friedrich under the umbrella. It was dreadful, but
she would have done it if the flock of draggle-tailed sparrows
on the hedge had been human beings, for she was very far gone
indeed, and quite regardless of everything but her own happiness.
Though it came in such a very simple guise, that was the crowning
moment of both their lives, when, turning from the night and
storm and loneliness to the household light and warmth and peace
waiting to receive them, with a glad "Welcome home!" Jo led her
lover in, and shut the door.

yareader2 - see my edit. Apologies, my original post wasn't clear.

# 85 and 86, to continue the love theme:

“A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back – it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.”

And:

“When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it is this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music – then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.”

From Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

"They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough."

Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson

And once more she looked round the best bedroom which was her prison, and thought of the Bastille, and wished she had a toad to tame, like the poor Viscount, or a flower to watch growing, like Picciola, and she was very sorry for herself, and very angry with her aunt, and very grieved at the conduct of her parents - she had expected better things from them - and now they had left her in this dreadful place where no one loved her, and no one understood her.

from The Aunt and Amabel by E. Nesbit

'For my own part,' she rejoined, 'I must confess that I never could see any beauty in her. Her face is too thin; her complexion has no brilliancy; and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose wants character; there is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so fine, I never could perceive anything extraordinary in them. they have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not like at all; and in her air altogether, there is a self-sufficiency without fashion, which is intorlerable,'

From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

#91 Oh, I love Caroline Bingley! I especially love Darcy's response. Thanks for posting that, jacx. I needed a giggle this morning.

It is always great when you start your morning off with a giggle. Almost done my book so there might not be many more giggles for a while.

Elizabeth's spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. "How could you begin?" said she. "I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first place?"

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

"My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners—my behaviour to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?"

"For the liveliness of your mind, I did."

"You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really amiable, you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously courted you. There—I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it; and really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable. To be sure, you knew no actual good of me—but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love."

"Was there no good in your affectionate behaviour to Jane while she was ill at Netherfield?"

"Dearest Jane! who could have done less for her? But make a virtue of it by all means. My good qualities are under your protection, and you are to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me to find occasions for teasing and quarrelling with you as often as may be; and I shall begin directly by asking you what made you so unwilling to come to the point at last. What made you so shy of me, when you first called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you called, did you look as if you did not care about me?"

"Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement."

"But I was embarrassed."

"And so was I."

"You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner."

"A man who had felt less, might."

From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Because there can never be too much.

very true, yareader

I think that "Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?" is one of my favorite sentences in all of literature.

You two are making me want to drop everything else I'm reading and pick up P&P again. For like the 20th time.

Nice to see someone is reading the same book as I am. Hope you are enjoying it. I finished it last night

Since you just finished P&P last night, then you'll remember the last line:

With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.

I never say "I've finished" at the close of one of Ms. Austen's novels. I guess I just don't want it to end.

I just started reading Thursday Next: First Among Sequels and I LOVE it. The first line got me:

"The dangerously high level of the supidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning."

Sounds much like my job.

97: yareader2...You are so right, after I have read the last word and closed the book, it will always be a part of me. There is no finish line or really an end to it. Thank you for reminding me of that. And yes I remember that last line. Still very fresh in my mind and heart.

#98 tiddleyboom...maybe you need to find another job.

Tonight I am reading two books. The first is Ot en Sien and is a Dutch children's book. I would like to share this children's poem from this book and one I remember as a young child my father use to put me on his knee and say this to me.

Trip - trap, trip - trap
Eerst gaat het in een stap.
Ho - Hop, ho - hop.
Nu voort in galop.
Het paardje loopt mooi.
Het krijgt lekker hooi.
Maar geef je het kaf,
Dan werpt het je af.

From The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine.

What exactly is a species? The definition of a species may seem a simple matter to you, but it puzzled and intrigued me whenever I thought about it, which I must admit was not that often, until I prepared to visit Darwin's islands. But once you begin thinking about it, where do you end I mean, what is it? How do you know? How do you decide? The idea that we all evolved from the same drop of ectoplasmic ooze I have always found to be perfectly reasonable. Nor is it biological diversity itself that alarms me. But look at one mockingbird and look at another. They appear similar, yet they are different species. Look at a Pekingese and greyhound. They appear different, yet they are the same species.

#100 Amen

"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of foreign narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turned out after all -- who they married, the date of their death -- with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy -

And music transports me immediately
into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found
himself at that time.

#80 VisibleGhost - I really want The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri. I tried to get it at B&N last Saturday (retail, even!) but they didn't carry it. They would order it, but I live 30 miles from B&N so didn't want to have to go back. I know, I can order it......

I'm reading The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. It's an ARC about the Puritans. Here's a bit about Roger Williams:

"Williams's greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety. And while his pursuit of truth leads him to some eccentric, if not laughable, applications of the Ten Commandments, his quest also leads him to some equally eccentric beliefs about racial equality, self-determination, and religious liberty that good people now hold dear. In his tormented, lonesome, obsessive, Calvinistic way, he is free. I find him hard to like, but easy to love."

eta to try to fix touchstone. Not successful.

#105

That sounds like an interesting book. Where does it start? In America? I like the Roger Williams of England, but I don't understand him too well once he came to America. I think of the Puritans as the original radical religious fundementalists. They were a wild group that suffered greatly for their beliefs.

Did you read that Roger Williams knew the poet John Milton?

#106 yareader2 - it talks about Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Colony's start in England, then mostly takes place in New England. I'm about half way through, so it may keep jumping back and forth - don't know.

So far what I'm getting is that they suffered because they had to leave England to follow their beliefs and were in what they considered an unsettled wilderness with unhappy natives near them. They were very organized and radical in the aspect of electing their religious leaders. They were also allowed to govern themselves in their political and religious lives. Williams was a problem for them in his ideas, apparently.... this is all very interesting to me. Thanks for the input.

I did not know that Roger Williams knew Milton. I think I need to read up on Roger Williams next. I do have a book about him called I, Roger Williams, which is fictional, but it's all I've got here at the house so I might start there..... probably sometime in the new year. My TBR is growing astronomically and I still have 30 888 challenge books to get through before the end of the year. As I just posted in another thread, I need a 2 week reading vacation just to behind in my reading! Not even close to being ahead.

yareader2 - you made me wiki.

I've been meaning to post something from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but I didn't have a chance to type anything out. So, here is something. For those who don't know the context, this is a post-apocalyptic novel. I know this is long, but I couldn't figure out how to shorten it. This is a dialogue between "the man" and "the boy". I've tried to leave the punctuation as it is in the book. The man is speaking in the first line.

Well. I think we’re about two hundred mile from the coast. As the crow flies.

As the crow flies?

Yes. It means going in a straight line.

Are we going to get there soon?

Not real soon. Pretty soon. We’re not going as the crow flies.

Because crows don’t have to follow roads?

Yes.

They can go wherever they want.

Yes.

Do you think there might be crows somewhere?

I dont know.

But what do you think?

I think it’s unlikely.

Could they fly to Mars or someplace?

No. They couldn’t.

Because it’s too far?

Yes.

Even if they wanted to.

Even if they wanted to.

What if they tried and they just got half way or something and then they were too tired. Would they fall back down?

Well. They really couldn’t get half way because they’d be in space and there’s not any air in space so they wouldn’t be able to fly and besides it would be too cold and they’d freeze to death.

Oh.

Anyway they wouldnt know where Mars was.

Do we know where Mars is?

Sort of.

If we had a spaceship could we go there?

Well. If you had a really good spaceship and you had people to help you I suppose you could go.

Would there be food and stuff when you got there?

No. There’s nothing there.

Oh.

They sat for a long time. They sat on their folded blankets and watched the road in both directions. No wind. Nothing. After a while the boy said: There’s not any crows. Are there?

No.

Just in books.

Yes. Just in books.

I didnt think so.

# 108...dchaikin...I really enjoyed reading your dialogue. To me it wasn't long enough.

Hi karenmarie and dchaikin,

I didn't just read wiki. :) I bet Williams was a problem in the new world, he was more educated then most of them. I still think it wasn't about the self governing, they were religious zealots, just like we have today running pell-mell around the globe. They saw Satan wherever they looked.

#108 same for me, you could have entered more. It was great.

Thought this was written in a unique sorta way.

As we jumped off the panga, onto the concrete steps, we had to be careful not to land on a large, sprawling sea lion. It's undignified to spot a sea lion and immediately begin cooing, as if it were one's brand-new grandchild. But that is what we all did. The sea lion ignored us. It had seen so many cooing tourists. Thank God you are not allowed to touch me, it thought, or you would pinch my cheeks and hug me too tight and say you could just eat me up, I was that cute. We stepped over the sleek mammalian bulk, we gazed adoringly into its enormous dark eyes, we walked up the concrete steps, doting ecograndparents.

The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine

#108 dchaikin - The Road is probably my best read of the year and possibly of the last several. I just finished it a month ago and plan to re-read it before the end of February at the latest. It is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.

Our bookclub discussed it at our last meeting (September 7th). Most of us loved it, a couple really hated it. We had a great discussion.

yareader2 - They did see Satan in everything. Their entire lives were spent seeing everything through the rose-colored glasses of their religion. They escaped England because they couldn't practice their religion, yet enforced the same strictures and controls in New England. The thing I liked about Williams was that he did not want civil interference in religious matters. I'm sure he thought everybody who didn't believe as he did would go to Hell, but he didn't want to put them in prison or banish them through the civil courts for that.

I'm to the part of The Wordy Shipmates where he, Williams, has been banished and ends up in Rhode Island. He was supposed to be put on a ship bound for England but was tipped off and escaped - and he was tipped off by John Winthrop! A complex relation between the two men, for sure.

Except for the author's inappropriate and stupid jokes and digressions into current-day politics and her childhood, it's a fascinating read. I really wish she'd have not tried to make it stand up comedy.

Glad you all enjoyed. :)

karenmarie - it is one of my favorites for the year too, and maybe better than anything I read last year. I've read several exceptionally good books this year, and The Road is one of them.

#112

I can definitely cross-reference you with one of the books I am reading, Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick It is an interesting topic because the details really float far away from the legend.

I would also line to share a passage from The Poisonwood Bible. I am almost finished with it and really had a love/hate relationship with it.

"We shared the fellowship of orphans. I felt it acutely, like a deep hunger for protein, and despaired for the flat-dirt expanse between Anatole and me. I begged him closer, inch by inch, clinging to his hands when he brought the cup. Now the bitterness of quinine and sweetness of kissing are two tastes perfectly linked on my soft palate. I had never loved a man before, physically, and I've read enough of both Jane Eyre and Brenda Starr to know every first love is potent. But when I fell into mine, I was drugged with the exotic delirium of malaria, so mine is omnipotent. How can I ever love anyone now but Anatole? Who else could make the colors of the aurora borealis rise off my skin where he strokes my forearm? Or send needles of ice tinkling blue through my brain when he looks into my eyes? What else but this fever could commute my father's ghost crying, "Jezebel!" into a curl of blue smoke drifting out through a small bright hole in the thatch? Anatole banished the honey-colored ache of malaria and guilt from my blood. By Anatole I am delivered not out of my life but through it.

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say, for I've loved my father fiercely my whole life, and it changed nothing. But now, all around me, the flame trees have roused from their long, dry sleep into walls of scarlett blossom. Anatole moves through the dappled shade at the edges of my vision, wearing the silky pelt of a panther. I crave to feel that pelt against my neck. I crave it with a predator's impatience, ignoring time, keening to the silence of owls. When he's gone away for a night or two, my thirst is inconsolable. When he comes back, I drink every kiss down to its end and still my mouth aches like a dry cave."

(I want malaria!!!!!)

lol :)

Sorry for typos, it's late.

From La Curee by Emile Zola

"The changes in Paris', he said, ' have given the working man a living'

"and we can add', resumed Monsieur Toutin-Larouce, 'that they have given a tremendous boost to finance and industry'

"As to the cost," declared Haffner, the deputy who never opened his mouth except on great occasions, ' that will be for our children to bear, nothing could be fairer."

She came as soon as she could. It was later than she had meant it to be but the rain, and the news that her brother had won his scholarship, and her uncle's sharp eyes following her suspiciously, had all contrived to make her late. But she came, with the last of the raindrops trailing the hem of her red dress and her long hair swinging loosely as she hurried. He was out on the veranda, waiting with barely concealed impatience, just as he told her he would be, smoking his pipe. He watched her as she ran in through the unlatched gate, caring nothing for the rain drumming the ground or the branches that shook and showered drops of water on her. Her dress was stained with dark patches of water. And she was smiling.

'Well,' he said, coming over swiftly towards her, his worries all ironed out by the sight of her. 'Are you going to stand there forever?'

He made as if to touch her but then, changing his mind, smiled instead. The rain vanished and the previous day's vague anxieties disappeared with it. The leaves shone as though they were studded with thousands of precious stones. And the whole day suddenly seemed extraordinarily iridescent and beautiful.

From Mosquito by the Sri Lankan Roma Tearne.

#115

Gee, was that Paris in the 1800's or this past week in NYC?

And #116 Just when I knock one book off my tbr list you have to give me another. Mosquito seems like an allluring piece of writing.

"I've never been prone to buying fancy clothes, or meals in nice restaurants. But I've always allowed myself to buy books, no matter how meager a budget I was living on at the time. Anytime I come across a book that holds the slightest potential that someday I may want to read some part of it I pick it up and bring it home. It isn't a mania for collecting -- it's a defense against boredom. The face that my shelves are filled with things I haven't yet read and want to, and things that I've read before and want to revisit, means that I will never be at a loss for entertainment at home."

From Reading the OED by Ammon Shea
To which I can only say I relate to this entirely.

One more that gives a better flavor of the book.
This is in reference to the face that at a conference of the Dictionary Society of North America, people reacted with surprise that he was reading the whole dictionary:

"For a brief period of time, I found myself wondering if what I am doing is so abstruse that even the lexicographers think I am a nerd."

#112...yareader...I am so glad that you shared what you did. How lovely! I am not certain it is malaria I want or Anatole. Reading this passage made me feel like I was reading poetry. The words flowed and were woven together. The idea of what is felt is explained in a way that I never thought possible.

How did you find the rest of the story?

# 116...akeela...How nice!!

# 118..bell7...Isn't rather odd that someone wrote the words that I have been thinking for years now?

Now it's my turn...

My eyes got used to the dark, and I noticed another lump of blankets beside me. I could not see who was inside. I heard a crash from the corner. that was where a percolator of hot water, heavy white mugs, a jar of instant coffee, and several boxes of tea bags always awaited the weary ecotravelers. A mug rolled past my face. A sailor pushed open the door, stepped over me and the other pile of blankets without a glance, and disappeared into the bowels of the ship. A box of tea bags slid past me. The percolator, quite empty, lodged itself in the small of my back. The door opened again. It was not a sailor. It was a quilt, identical to mine, and a pillow.

"Is that you?" the blanket said.

"Yes," I said.

"No, it isn't, said the blanket in a disgusted voice. It swished past me and went out the door on the other side.

The door slammed shut and the pile of blankets beside me sat up.

"Is that you?" it said.

"Yes," I said.

"It is not," said the pile, then rose from the floor and followed the first blanket.

I pictured the ghostly figues flitting about the stormy decks. At that moment, damp and alone, I wished "it" had been me. Oh, good! the other blanket would have said. Come and haunt the boat with us. Come join us in our revelries!

Another blanket appeared in a few minutes.

"Is that you," I said.

"Certainly not," said Mrs. Cornwall

The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine

#117 yareader2,

That's whats nice about great literature it transends every age. Speaks to us from across the span of time.
I've just started reading Emile Zolas' 20 book cycle Les Rougon-Macquart (The Kill is the second in the series ) and so far I've found his themes very modern for books written a century and a half ago. Or mabe it's just that peaple don't change, and they are doomed to repeat the same old mistakes.

#118: bell7,

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
--- A.E. Newton

#119

I'm not finished yet, hopefully tonight, but I started off liking it, then I could just ( sorry,sorry,sorry for saying this) rip out the middle for a coaster for my coffee cup, then I love and have gained new respect for Ms. Kingsolver in the final section called Exodus. It is a wonderful, meaningful ending. I know I will feel the closure.

As for malaria, this is the first romantic writing I can recall. I wouldn't mind a slight case if I could have "How can I ever love anyone now but Anatole? Who else could make the colors of the aurora borealis rise off my skin where he strokes my forearm?" :P

>120 usnmm2 -- Excellent! You've just given me the excuse I need to keep reading books from the library even while accumulating even more that I have not yet read. "A soul reaching towards infinity..." It is rather true, though. I will never have finished all the books I own because my buying will be ahead of my reading at all times. There's something both depressing and comforting about that thought.

122: bell7

AMEN ! and Hallelujah !

So if you all love books so much, why haven't you read my book, The Ghost of Neil Diamond? I don't like him either. It's not an excuse. I've read a lot these 122 entries and skimmed the rest and there's not one mention of my book. That's ridiculous. It's been available a month now - Amazon and everywhere. www.whattradition.com
And to get back to the start of this Topic, here's the opening line, which is perfect: Amen to all sorrows.

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that could trust. Tonight I feel that m love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

The Time Traveler's Wife

That is a great quote sanja. It was an odd story as I recall it, I don't want to spoil it if you are in the middle, but the author is definitely a romantic.

In her search for a greater understanding of herself Alice Steinbach learns the art of the Japanese dance in Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman:

The music started and for the next thirty minutes I tried to follow Ouka's slow, graceful movements. But after ten minutes of trying to imitate the effortless skill of her hand and arm movements – particularly those involving the silver fan – and the delicate tilting motion of her head, I realized it could take thirty years for me to reach an approximation of what Wakayagi dancing should look like. Still, I continued on, surprised that I felt little embarrassment about my awkwardness. For some reason I felt protected in this environment where the mood of my hosts seemed completely nonjudgmental. Instead of shame, what I felt was a reawakening to the essential humility of learning. Being a student always meant looking up to someone wiser and always measuring yourself against that wisdom and knoweldge. But being a student always meant experiencing the thrill that comes from adding a new piece to the puzzle of where and how you fit into the larger world.

A change of pace, maybe too much of one. This is a footnote from Terry Pratchett's Sourcery about the Librarian of the unseen university in discworld.

* A magical accident in the Library, which as has already been indicated is not a place for your average rubber-stamp-and-Dewy-decimal employment, had some time ago turned the Librarian into an orangutan. He had since resisted all efforts to turn him back. He liked the handy long arms, the prehensile toes and the right to scratch himself in public, but most of all he liked the way all the big questions of existence had suddenly resolved themselves into a vague interest in where his next banana was coming from. It wasn't that he was unaware of the despair and nobility of the human condition. It was just that as far as he was concerned you could stuff it.

From A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

"Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn't honor my father either. They couldn't very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?"

I love this thread. Where did everybody go? more!? More!

Thank you everyone for sharing your passages!
I flagged this passage and I am happy to have someone to share it with. I just finished White Horses by Alice Hoffman this morning:

"During the summer when she was eleven, Teresa believed that the crickets who lived in the weeds that sprang through the sidewalk were trying to speak to her. At night, while the rest of the family slept, she sat in her bedroom on the second floor, close to the window, listening for the words she was certain those insects were forming, waiting for a clear green song. There were times when Teresa fell asleep listening for the crickets' message, her feet curled beneath her as she sat in a wooden chair, her long braids still neat and tight. There were other times when she stayed awake nearly till morning, convinced that if she were quiet enough, if she waited long enough, the night would reveal itself to her in a slow stream of syllables shaped by wings; a song only she could understand."

"Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them."

An arsonist's guide to writers' homes in new england by Brock Clarke

Sums up that book pretty well. I liked it a lot, funny AND sad.

#131 I believe. Thanks for that one. I have to add one.

# 132 love it! OF course, I can also say the truth can lead to pain, but since misery loves company no problems with loneliness.

# 131 PaperbackPirate...What a nice passage! Amazing...thanks for sharing it with us.

# 131 dancingstarfish... After reading your passage, I couldn't stop the tears from falling.

I had met a gentleman friend through work, a customer of mine, a big tipper, always a smile, always complimenting me.

Little by little we got to know eachother. He later owned a coffee shop that I use to frequently visit, either to help out or just to spend time with a friend. He told many funny stories about when he was married and his twin daughters were small. His marriage ended and his girls had grown up to be doctors with family of their own. He would buy things from me for his grandchildren and daughters, spending way more than any of my other Avon customers. When I tried to give him something free for spending over $200.00 he refused but insisted that he only wanted a picture of me for his wallet. Like his many funny stories I took this as not being serious.

He later found out that he was dying from cancer and would visit me first before he headed home from his tests at the hospital. He promised that before he left this world he would introduce me to a close friend of his who was a popular country star. He assured me that I had much more beauty than she will ever have. Mine came from the heart.

After his death I found out he was never married. Didn't have children or grandchildren. Didn't know any music star. He was alone. He had no one.

I never could understand why he would lie to me.

Reading that passage I totally understand and don't have to wonder why he lied anymore.

Thank you so very much for sharing that passage.

* and I never did give him a picture of me.

"My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie."

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

From Back on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber

I was interested in learning who would knit a prayer shawl and why. My little group of knitters was teaching me.
I pointed out that the border was knit in a seed pattern of knit three, purl three. "Does anyone have a comment on the pattern?"
I asked, curious about what the women would say.
"I'll bet the three stitches are significant," Colette murmured as she switched the yarn from the back to the front in order to purl.
"Yes," I agreed. "Three is a significant number in our culture."
"Faith, hope, love," Alix stated in a thoughtful tone.
"Mind, body, spirit," Susannah said.
"Past, present, future," Colette threw in. I wondered again if living day to day was all she could handle.
"What about birth, life, death." this came fraom Margaret, who'd finished with her customer. Dressed in her dark sweather, she hovered in the doorway, a gloomy and forbidding presence. It figured, or course that she'd be the one to bring up the subject of death.
I didn't meet her eyes as I circled the table. "All excellant observations," I murmured.
Why knit a shawl?" Margaret went on. " mean, we could be knitting anything for someone who needs a bit of TLC."
"True." I agreed with her there. A lap robe or any of a dozen other projects would do just as well.
"Why a shwl, then?" Alix asked.
I shrugged. "What do the rest of your think?"
Colette spoke first. "Wrapping a shawl around someone is a symbolic embrace. That's how it seems to me, anyway."
The others nodded.
"I like that Colette said- it's like a hug".

#136 interesting piece. I just placed this book and The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs on my tbr pile this summer.

#135 That took my beath away

I have to say, I used to read lines or books as a whole and have that yearning to share with someone what I just read, to have someone else experience it too. And then of course, I'd look around only to see the open space of the park I was at or the emptiness of my comfy living room.

Now, I can go onto LT and write it down and someone else, somewhere, will sigh with me and appreciate it as well. Thats nice.

I agree completely, dancingstarfish. LT fills that need/desire to interact about the beauty of the written word. Once a month book club just doesn't keep up with my desire to discuss books!

Message 136: callmejacx
After reading your passage yesterday, I had to laugh when 3s came up in the book I'm reading, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield:

"Ah the rule of three...The magic number. Three trials before the prince wins the hand of the fair princess. Three wishes granted to the fisherman by the magic talking fish. Three bears for Goldilocks and Three Billy Goats Gruff. Miss Lea, if you had asked me two questions or four I might have been able to lie, but three..."

140: pirate, I just finished that book a few minutes ago! I hope you are enjoying it :)

# 140 PaperbackPirate. When I read your passage it sounded so familier. Then I saw what book it was from. This book was a Christmas gift last year. I must say I did enjoy it. That same passage is one that I have written down. I remember reading it outloud to my husband. Loved that passage. It was nice to read it once again.

From A Distant Mirror "Teutonic knights in their annual forays against the unconverted natives of Lithuania conducted manhunts of the peasants for sport."

From Mister Pip, "He Mr. Watts had given us Pip, and I had come to know his Pip as if he were real and I could feel his breath on my cheek. I had learned to enter the soul of another."

From Son of Man by Robert Silverberg
I stand before the the stars. I coax melodies from them. I the wanderer from the sealed past, I the exile, I the victim: here I am with my companions. With the sons of man. So am I that small? Am I that feeble? Sing! Fill the universe with thunders! Now woodwinds, brasses, strings, percussion! Now and now and now and now! He extends across the cosmos from wall to wall. He laughs. He roars. He fondles suns. He whistles. He sobs. He shouts his name. He exults. And the tuned stars chime.
And Hanmer says quietly, when the moment comes, "It is done. Now we go back."

From John Adams by David McCullough -- well, from the man himself really:

"We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls...

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect, and veneration introduced by persons of authority of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way."

There's a reason he's one of my favorite presidents.

A lovely passage on friendship from A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton:

I had an intimacy with Theresa I had never expected to have with anyone I could walk in the door at her house and call, 'Yoo-hoo,' just the way Laura Petrie and her popeyed Millie used to do back in the Golden Age. I always took care to wipe my feet and check my hands and fingernails. When I was sure I was clean I put the copper kettle on for coffee and sat down at the oiled butcher-block table to wait. There were equal measures of comfort and amusement in our communications; I think it is safe to say that we delighted in one another. She used to laugh at my stories until she wept, and I tried to take her sound advice to heart. The quality of our friendship seemed to me to be heaven-sent, something that I had not received in direct relation to any deed performed. At first I thought it a windfall, free of charge. 'Make yourself at home,' Theresa always used to sing out from upstairs. Like a nervous suitor her saying so every time made me wonder if the instruction on some day might suddenly change.

#147...akeela...That is a lovely passage.

A passage that struck me while reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

On that evening the man she would marry was there, the only man ever allowed in the presence of women not from his family. He would be sweaty, ordinary looking, sometimes much older, wearing the long Saudi robe. The women would all hush as he came in. To Haweya and me, men were not from another planet, but to the Saudi women in the room, the bridegroom's arrival was hugely significant. Every wedding was like this: all the women falling silent, breathless with anticipation, and the figure who appeared, entirely banal.

From chapter 1 of
Orlando by Virginia Woolf:

"The great Frost was, the historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in the mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner."

From the Camilla Gibb's novel, Sweetness in the Belly, describing the protagonist's lover, Aziz:
“He's like rrata. A piece of meat stuck between my teeth.”

Lilly, from European descent comparing her body to that of the Ethiopian Amina's:
“My body is a whisper, where hers is a shout.”

And a random paragraph:
“Amina lights a stick of incense and waves it in one hand as she sings a song of few but potent words. The coffee beans smoke and chuckle their way from green to brown, transforming this cramped, windowless room on the ground floor of a house in a desperate London borough into a more comprehensible world. A familiar world where the smell of coffee draws women together, an olfactory call throughout a neighbourhood luring women from their homes to gather, to chatter, to solve the mysteries and miseries of the universe, or at least of their domestic lives.”

"... for me, Afghanistan ... was about being among a people who had nothing but gave everything. It was a land where people learnt to smell the first snows or the mountain bear on the wind and for whom an hour spent staring at a beautiful flower was an hour gained rather than wasted. A land where elders rather than libraries were the true source of knowledge, and the family and the tribe meant far more than the sum of individuals."
from The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan by Christina Lamb.

#152...akeela...what a touching paragraph that was. Very nice. Makes one stop and think about spending time looking at the things around you.

Going along with first snows and stopping to smell the flowers reminds me of Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. When Helen confesses her love for Gilbert by giving him a rose, saying:

This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nurish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. Will you have it?

>153, glad you enjoyed the excerpt, Jacx!

I think you'll like following passage, too. This is the opening paragraph of The Seasons of the Beento Blackbird by Akosua Busia set between the Caribbean, Ghana and New York:

There is no blue like the blue of the Caribbean Sea. No rhythm like the rocking of her waves. No taste like her salt-sea tongue. No touch like her soft warm wetness. Every time the fisherman hit dry land, he missed her – the lullaby of her call, the lapping of her hypnotic laughter as she stretched herself across the horizon. People called her the Caribbean, but to him she was Cara, Cara the beautiful. Away from the sea he was empty, a deep well with no water; but in her aquamarine presence, to the depths of his soul, he was full to overflowing. “My love is wide,” he used to call out to the soaring seabirds, “deep and wide like Cara.”

#154...yareader2...From now on I will see a rose and think of it differently. How can I not? What a wonderful passage.

#155...akeela...You are so right. I so enjoyed your passage. I could never get enough of these extraordinary words. Keeps sharing them.

#155 - akeela, I love those words. Listening to them is like being carried out to sea on gentle waves!

"Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, -- 'Wait and hope'."

-- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Best. Quote. Ever. I love that he closes the book with those lines. I'm a such a closet Romantic.

>156 Jacx, it's wonderful to be able to share lit with people who can appreciate it!

>157 - Hemlokgang, I'm so glad you mentioned the book on your thread, and inspired me to move it right up my tbr pile. I'm about 60 pages in now, and the writing's so wonderful - almost lyrical - I think I'm ecstatic! :)

Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in the 1700's. So this struck me:

"No man of common sense will value a woman the less for not giving up herself at the first attack or not accepting his proposal without inquiring into his person or character;on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all creatures, as the rate of the men now goes; in short, he must have a very contemptible opinion of her capacities that, having but one cast for her life, shall cast that life away at once and make matrimony, like death, be a leap in the dark."

and

"She is always married too soon who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late who gets a good one."

#160 ...sanja...commenting on the last two lines. That is certainly how we feel as women.

EYEBRIGHT._A STORY._
By SUSAN COOLIDGE,

AUTHOR OF "THE NEW YEAR'S BARGAIN," "WHAT KATY DID,"
"WHAT KATY DID AT SCHOOL," "MISCHIEF'S THANKSGIVING,"
"NINE LITTLE GOSLINGS."
_Copyright_,
By Roberts Brothers.
1879.

Does anyone know this story? It is new to me, but I love it. The first lines come from the opening paragraph of the book. I felt I was reading a loving memory of a first teacher in elementary school.

The second part is dialog from the children play acting, that is where the story of Lady Jane and Lord Guilford comes to life. I hope it is not too confusing.

**BTW sanja, your lines struck me too.**

CHAPTER I.

LADY JANE AND LORD GUILDFORD.

"It wanted but five minutes to twelve in Miss Fitch's schoolroom, and a
general restlessness showed that her scholars were aware of the fact.
Some of the girls had closed their books, and were putting their desks
to rights, with a good deal of unnecessary fuss, keeping an eye on the
clock meanwhile. The boys wore the air of dogs who see their master
coming to untie them; they jumped and quivered, making the benches
squeak and rattle, and shifted their feet about on the uncarpeted
floor, producing sounds of the kind most trying to a nervous teacher.
A general expectation prevailed. Luckily, Miss Fitch was not nervous.
She had that best of all gifts for teaching,--calmness; and she
understood her pupils and their ways, and had sympathy with them. She
knew how hard it is for feet with the dance of youth in them to keep
still for three long hours on a June morning; and there was a
pleasant, roguish look in her face as she laid her hand on the bell,
and, meeting the twenty-two pairs of expectant eyes which were fixed
on hers, rang it--dear Miss Fitch--actually a minute and a half before
the time."

*********************************************

"At that moment Lady Jane heard a tap at the door.

'See who it is, Margaret,' she said.

Margaret opened the door, and there stood before her astonished eyes
a knight clad in shining armor.

'Who are you, Sir Knight, and wherefore do you come?' she cried, in
amaze.

'I am come to see the Lady Jane Grey,' he replied; 'I have a message
for her from Lord Guildford Dudley.'

'From my noble Guildford,' shrieked Lady Jane, rushing forward.

'Even so, madam,' replied the knight, bowing profoundly.

Here Eyebright paused for a large bite of bread and butter.

"Go on--please go on," pleaded Bessie, whose mouth happened to be
empty just then.

Mumble, mumble,--"the Lady Jane sank back on her couch"--resumed
Eyebright, speaking rather thickly by reason of the bread and butter.
"She was very pale, and one tear ran slowly down her pearly cheek.

'What says my lord?' she faintly uttered.

'He bids me to tell you to hope on, hope ever,' cried the knight;
'the jailer's daughter has promised to steal her father's keys
to-night, unbar his door, and let him escape.'

'Can this be true?' cried Margaret--that's you, you know, Bessie--be
ready to catch me.'Help! my lady is about to faint with joy.'

Here Eyebright sank on the grass, while Bessie made a dash, and raised
her head.

'Is it? Can it be--true?' murmured the Lady Jane,--her languid hand
meanwhile stealing into the dinner-pail, and producing therefrom a big
red apple.

'It is true--the blessed news is indeed true,' cried the true-hearted
Margaret.

'I feel new life in my veins;' and the Lady Jane sprang to her feet.

That is why embittered pople find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say. The madman committed suicide, the hero offered himself up to martyrdom in the name of a cause, but both would die, and the embittered would spend many nights and days remarking on the absurdity and the glory of both. It was the only moment when the embittered person had the energy to clamber up his defensive walls and peer over at the world outside, but then his hands and feet would grow tired and he would return to daily life.

The chronically embittered person only noticed his illness once a week, on Sunday afternoons. Then, with no work or routine to relieve the symptoms, he would feel that something was very wrong, since he found the peace of those endless afternoons infernal and felt only a keen sense of constant irritation.

Monday would arrive, however, and the embittered man would immediately forget his symptoms, although he would curse the fact that he never had time to rest and would complain that the weekends always passed far too quickly.

Veronika decides to die by Paulo Coelho.

>30 brokensnowpea, i love the 3rd quote, I posted that one before too!

here is my quote:

"When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
I fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free. "

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

I've seen that before dancingstarfish and really love it. I opened book club one night with that poem. (Whoever hosts book club opens with a poem, usually relevant to the book.)

really? i've never heard that, thats a nice tradition!

That was really nice dancingstarfish.

A few nights ago, I came across a poem in the book I am reading called Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. I had just came from the hospital, where I had seen many suffering, and heard many stories from their suffering families.

Today, I saw a lovely girl with golden hair,
envied her and wished I were so fair.
When she rose to go, she hobbled sown the aisle.
She had one leg, wore a crutch and a smile.
Oh God forgive me when I whine
I have two legs, and the world is mine.

Then I stopped to buy some sweets.
The lad who sold them had such charm.
I talk with him - my being late was no harm.
As I left, he said, "You've been so kind.
You see," he said, "I am blind."
Oh God forgive me when I whine
I have two eyes, and the world is mine.

Later, I saw a child with eyes of blue.
Watching others play, not knowing what to do.
"Why don't you join the others, dear."
He stared ahead, he could not hear.
Oh God forgive me when I whine

Author Unknown

From The Red Badge of Courage. A young soldier charging the enemy line:

Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an impervious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power. He kept near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and an imploring cry went from his mind.

From A Land Remembered:

"I'll see to him, Pappa. I'll feed him and water him and brush him down too. I ran him pretty hard coming back to the hammock"
Tobias watched him run away, seeing him as a boy again but knowing that such a time was gone forever. He said. "You'll see to it proper Zech. You always have."

>167, callmejacx,

my god! That was sufficiently heartbreaking, what a sad poem. I liked it though, too bad we don't know who it was by.

A bit of a rant running through the protagonist's mind after she is refered to as a "feminist" in Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta:

“Was I? If a woman sneezed in my country, someone would call her a feminist. I'd never looked up the word before, but was there one word to describe how I felt from one day to the nextAnd should there be? I'd seent he metamorphosis of women, how age slowed their walks, stilled their expressions, softened their voices, distorted what came out of their mouths. They hid their discontent so that other women wouldn't deprive them of it. By the time they came of age, millions of personalities were channeled into about three prototypes: strong and silent, chatterbox but cheerful, weak and kindhearted. All the rest were known as horrible women. I wanted to tell everyone, `I! Am! Not! Satisfied with these options!' I was ready to tear every notion they had about women, like one of those little dogs with trousers in their teeth. They would not let go until there was nothing but shreds, and I would not let go until I was heard. Sometimes it felt like I was fighting annihilation. But surely it was in the interest of self-preservation to fight what felt like annihilation? If a person swiped a fly and the fly flew higher, would the fly become a flyist?”

From Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era in the chapter on Sojourner Truth:

But Truth would not be silenced. "That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best places everywhere," she exploded. "Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me any best place! And aren't I a woman?" (Here she bared her right arm to the shoulder, revealing powerful biceps resulting from years of hard labor.) "I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear the lash as well! And aren't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And aren't I a woman?"

From Marguerite Burning by Elizabeth Innes Brown:

“I went back into the house. The smoke was curling about my things, caressing the wing-back chair, pausing over the open book on the table, sending a sidelong glance at the garden plans laid out there. Everything seemed gray and distant. I picked up a sheaf of drawing paper and waved it at the smoke, coaxed and cajoled it out the front door and out the back. Slowly the air cleared and the colors returned. I stood for a moment, sniffing the air, surveying the damage, asking myself what the smoke had wanted with me. It must have had a powerful desire to stay inside, when it loved nothing more than to rise straight up to the moon.”
By the time you came, only a wisp or two of the smoke remained, wandering about the house in a forlorn and desultory fashion, as it had lost all ambition and didn’t know what to do with itself. It would be some time before I would recognize this for the sign it was, would be able to read the message the smoke brought to me, the way it foretold that day’s events.”

I don’t know what happens next ... can’t wait to find out!

"...Dawes is murmuring the queer verses of the wards. Now my mind has caught the words up- I think I shall recite them with her, all night long.

What sort of grain best suit stiff soils?
What is that acid which dissolves silver?
What is relief, and how should shadows fall?"

Affinity- Sarah Waters

"What does this make you think of" asked Anne.
"Well, know, I dunno" answered Mathew.
"A bride, of course!" she answered.

From Anne of green gables

"Most of the others were out on Saturday nights, so the lobby was usually deserted. I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing."
Norwegian Wood

Very nice dancingstarfish

yes :) i liked it.

Tell us more

from Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

She was, as always in the past, a person of little indecision, a person for whom habitual quiet did not mean anxiety or regret.

It kind of describes myself, but it was really Louis talking about Claudia.

All colors make me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt-
An indoor vision, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of frozen stillicide-
Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.

From Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

The opening lines from Gifts by Nuruddin Farah:

Duniya had been awake for a while, conscious of the approaching dawn. She had dreamt of a restless butterfly; of a cat waiting attentively for the fretful insect's shadow to stay still for an instant so as to pounce on it. Then the dark room lit up with the brightness of fireflies, agitated breaths of light, soft, quiet as foam. Faint from heat, Duniya watched the goings-on, supine. The butterfly flew here and there, movements mesmeric in its circling rainbow of colours. As if hypnotized, the cat's eyes closed dramatically, and it fell asleep.
Fully awake, Duniya got out of bed.

#181 & #182. Very nice passages. It makes me feel like I am reading the wrong types of books. But then again I do enjoy reading the books that I have read.

Here...I will share a paragraph from my book.

I mean to say, I remembered now that I had come out without my umbrella, and yet here I was, beyond any question of doubt, umbrellaed to the gills. What had caused me to take up the one that had been leaning against a seventeenth-century chair. I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella reach out for the nearest on in sight, like a flower groping toward the sun.

The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

fantastic quote, jacx! the whole book is quotable, isn't it? I love Wodehouse so so much!

Nothing like the lovely quotes that others have shared but certainly original quotes from P.G. Wodehouse. None of my friends have heard of this man. It is so hard to believe.

I have to agree with Jennifer - love the quote, Jacx! Thanks for sharing.

From A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.

ACT II, Scene two:

MRS. JOHNSON: (....) Well - I always thinks like Booker T. Washington said that time - "Education has spoiled many a good plow hand" -

MAMA: Is that what old Booker T. said?

JOHNSON: He sure did.

MAMA: Well, it sounds just like him. The fool.

JOHNSON (Indignantly): Well - he was one of our great men.

MAMA: Who said so?

From The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

"I should like to have a word with you Wooster."

"Oh, yes?"

"I have been talking to Sir Watkyn Bassett, and he has told me the whole story of the cow-creamer."

"Oh, yes?"

"And we know why you are here."

"Oh, yes?"

"Stop saying "Oh, yes?" you miserable worm, and listen to me.

I know I was the last one to give a passage but I saw this and wanted to so much share it with you all. I do hope no one minds.

From The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Owing to the fact that the shock had caused my tongue to get tangled up with my tonsils, inducing an unpleasant choking sensation, I found myself momentarily incapable of speech.

Nobody minds. :) Post as many passages as you want. :)

I will remember you said that sanja...could you remind others too?
lol

callmejacx: you can post Wodehouse all you like, it always brings a smile to my face.

From The Last Child- John Hart
(It's his latest book- ITS AWESOME!!)

"Don't you see?" She begged with her eyes.
"There is always more to lose."
She reached for his ahnd but he jerked it away. In its place, she gripped the bed rail with both hands and light glinted in her hair.
"Pray with me, Johnny."
"For What?"
"For us to stay together. For help in letting go."

from The Trinity and the Kingdom by
Jurgen Moltmann

''if God is capable
of loving something else, then he lays himself open to the suffering
which love for another brings him; and yet, by virtue of his love,
he remains master of the pain that love causes him to suffer. God
does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To
this extent he is 'apathetic'. But he suffers from the love which is
the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is
'pathetic'. ''

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.

From Three Men in a Boat.

Wow...that was poetry...that was great sanja...thanks for sharing.

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

From My Antonia by Willa Cather.

love it sanja!

The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.

{the martian chronicles}

#199 tafadhali...Very nice.

I concoct a word that doesn't exist in our language but still might have meaning or should have: glimmerless. I am glimmerless. I write down the word next to my name.

On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can't reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. like me, its glimmerless. You can't see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replace by texture. The mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do. That's its beauty.

210 dancingstarfish...What book was that from?

Feast of Love right at the beginning. I just started it and already love the way he writes :)

203...daningstarfish...I found it amazing how he could write all that about an antique mirror. One not only can see it but almost be able to touch it. You will have to keep me up to date on other such passages.

"I missed my studies with Dr. Trefusis inveterately; for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family; and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered" (143).

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson

>callmejacx, it had a few passages like that which I really loved and marked. i'll go back and find them!

for now, from another book,

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

What was the last passage from? What interesting books you must read.

"The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows—the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others—callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox."

The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Doc found himself shouting. "I don't want a wife. I have all the women I want!"
"Woman and women is two different things," said Suzy. "Guy knows all about women he don't know nothing about a woman."

Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck

"Secrets are the blood of life. Every big thing is a secret, even when you know it, because you never know all of it. If you can know everything about antything it's not worth knowing."

The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies

I haven't read that Robertson Davies book. I must put it on my wish list. Thanks for sharing C.J.B.

nfnaaron: 208 + 209 what great passages.

bookgirl271:212 It's easy to find great passages in writers like that, isn't it?

Here's my (cough) review of Sweet Thursday. (cough)

This time tomorrow where shall I be?
Not in this Academy.
No more Latin, No more French.
No more sitting on a hard school bench.
No more beetles in my tea.
Making googly eyes at me.
No more spiders in my bath.
Trying hard to make me Laugh.
No more slugs in my dinner.
Which the staff say make me thinner.
Then the train goes puff puff puff.
I'll be in it sure enough.

ANON

When We Were Young by John Burningham

He said,"Take the reins, Ray boy. Go on take 'em for your dad"

Last Orders by Graham Swift

okay, hemlokgang and mobilemaker. you've finally pushed me over the edge and the public library has the enchantress of florence on cd and there're no holds and the narrator's a good one.

huzzah!

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson's was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson's down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing "the House," you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight.

Charles Dickens, A tale of two cities

edit: for some reason, the touchstone part doesn't work on this book.

"The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast - unaccountable headwinds by night - and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizzentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. "Try a piece of this, old cock," he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. "It might put a little heart into you." The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.

Some minutes later he felt the touch on his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying towards the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.

"In this bucket," said Stephen, walking into the cabin, "in this small half-bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London and Paris combined: these animalculae - what is the matter with the sloth?" It was curled on Jack's knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack's glass stood empty on the table.

Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable, bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.

Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, "Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

h.m.s. surprise by patrick o'brian

I, Clara James, hereby declare that on Tuesday, April 19, I entered the apartment house at 620 East End Avenue, New York City, at or about 6:15 p.m., and took the elevator to the 13th floor. I rang the bell at the door of the studio of Alberto Mion. No one came to the door and there was no sound from within. The door door was not quite closed. It was not open enough to show a crack, but was not latched or locked. After ringing again and getting no response, I opened the door and entered.

Curtains for Three by Rex Stout

The extraordinary is a province of the solitary soul. Lost, the very moment the crowd comes into view, it remains within the great hollow of dreams, an infinitely secluded place that prepares itself for your arrival, and for mine. Extraordinary joy, extraordinary pain - the fearful poles of the world that both menaces and surpasses this one. It is a miraculous hell towards which, one unknowingly wanders.

The Sect of the Idiot by Thomas Ligotti

They got a game up there, you ever hear of it, called curling? You have this big stone and you throw it down the ice, like bowling, really, more like lawn bowling, and these otehr people standing around have brooms and they brush the living shit out of the ice and that's the way it's played. I saw in on the television one time. It's practically a national sport the way the guy explained it, and he said they used to play it with jam pots. What the hell? They say you can tell a lot about people by the sport, you know, they refect what they feel in the sports they pick. Well, all I got to say is everytime I think of Canada I think of thse poor, dumb bastards flailing away with a broom while a rock goes whizzing by.

Hardware clerk, Cape Charles, Virginia

As They See Us by Walter Stewart

From Corelli's Mandolin, Dr. Iannis to his daughter Pelagia:

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it,, we had roots that grew toward each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

jnwelch: that's really beautiful, I recently finished Corelli's Mandolin, and it was full of such lovely writing.

jnwelch...I have to cut and paste that one. If that book has lovely writing like that I am going to have to get it. Thanks for sharing.

"Most of us don't live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what's going on around us, we're so busy time-traveling."

from Lisa Unger's Black Out

#221 i LOVE this! thanks.

thanks #222 - made me add that to my wishlist ;)

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, the beginning of Gyan and Sai as he tutors her.

"Good afternoon," said Gyan.

She looked up and he felt a deep pang.

Back at the dining table, the mathematics books between them, tortured by graphs, by decimal points of perfect measurement, Gyan was conscious of the fact that a being so splendid should not be seated before a shabby textbook; it was wrong of him to have forced this ordinariness upon her - the bisection and rebisection of the bisection of an angle. Then, as if to reiterate the fact that he should have remained at home, it began to pour again and he was forced to shout over the sound of the rain on the tin roof, which imparted an epic quality to geometry that was clearly ridiculous.

#227 hey zapzap, i love the bit about his shouting imparting 'an epic quality to geometry that was clearly ridiculous.' *chuckle*

from the towers of trebizond by rose macaulay

when Laurie, the narrator, her aunt dot, the camel, father chantry-pigg and the Greek student, Xenophon Paraclydes, leave what was ancient trebizond (now Trabzon) for Armenia, they soon found themselves

'among the rhododendrons and the azaleas which had supplied the madding honey to the Ten Thousand, and the May breezes blew about, sweet with the tangs of lemon trees and fig trees and aromatic shrubs; and pomegranates and cucumbers and tobacco plants and gourds and all the fruits you would expect flourished in the woods we went through and i thought the Garden of Eden had possibly been situated here.'

mirrordrum, you've won me over with that passage, thanks.

From Rushdie's Midnight's children

"Is it possible to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma's bizarre behaviour; and this explaination at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken..."

#228 - me too! i could picture the moment so clearly in those words. your passage made me miss summer :( winter has just definitely arrived here and it's biting.

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her mouth

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her mouth to

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her mouth to speak

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her mouth to speak just

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her mouth to speak just as

Ankhesenamun smiled at her friends...near the pylon entrance to the temple.

She opened her mouth to speak just as a glaze of cloud drifted into the temple, filling it with its soft whiteness. She tried to see through it, but there were only shadows, except for momentary breaks, revealing familiar grieving faces.

She wanted to tell them that everything was going t be all right, but she could not speak. With one last effort she forced words from her lips. "I am leaving you, dear friends. Remember me as you knew me once--by my true name, my father's child, Ankhesenpaaten."

She heard a plaintive cry muffled in the gloom. She moved in the direction of her father's colossus, arms outstretched down a ramp that would guide her to him. She wanted to be with her father, the child of the aten and the source of her light. She knew where it was if only she could...

The clouds, white as the purest cotton, enveloped her now, and from somewhere grains of sand driven on a whistling wind bit into her skin. The wind sang in her ears. She imagined other people assaulted by the desert wind and wanted to stay their fears, but could not summon up the energy to speak. She felt her body floating down through the mist, heard the soft cry of many voices, and then the gentle feel of arms taking her by the waist. The wind had stopped and she felt a joyous languor. Her breathing seemed to end in the middle of a long sigh. Above her, waxing and waning in the white mist, the calcite stone majesty of her father, Akhenaten.

And a long golden shaft of dazzling light before the dark.

from "The Woman Who Would Be Pharaoh." ...w. Klein

"On the hall side of the kitchen door the organ music was deafening. Drusilla was an appallingly bad player who had never been told other than that she was very good, but to play with such consistent ineptitude required remorseless practice, so between four and six every weekday afternoon, Drusilla practised. There was some point to it, as she inflicted her lack of talent on the largely Hurlingford congregation at the Byron Church of England each Sunday; luckily no Hurlingford had an ear for music, so all the Hurlingfords thought they were very well served during service."

from The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough.

#230 hey errata--in re: rose macauley's towers of trebizond, trust me, you won't regret reading it. indeed, i challenge to read a couple of pages and then stop. impossible.

i hope you'll let me know if you do read it.

>#222;
How very lovely.

"If you could wait a year," the old man said at last, "a year or two is nothing when you're thirty five. If you could wait a year, not more than two surely, then I wouldn't mind. You're not the oldest, Joseph, but I've always thought of you as the one to have the blessing. Thomas and Burton are good men, good sons, but I've always intended the blessing for you, so you could take my place. I don't know why. There's something more strong in you than in your brothers, Joseph; more sure and inward."

from: To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

"Christian theology is the elixir, the philosopher's stone, which turns the mundane into the epiphanic, the world of nature into the realm of God's creation. Like a lens bringing a vast landscape into sharp focus, or a map helping us grasp the features of the terrain around us, Christian doctrine offers a new way of understanding, imagining and behaving."

from A Fine-Tuned Universe: the Quest for God in Science and Theology by Alister E. McGrath

(Published too recently to have a touchstone?)

When you are engulfed in flames by David Sedaris

-David and his bf hugh are speaking to two different students in japan who requested to speak with them to practice their english. In this excerpt, David is talking to Student No.2-

"What wild animals do you have in Tokyo?" I asked.
"Wild animal?"
"Do you have squirrels?"
No response.
I pretended to fill my cheeks with nuts, and the young man said, "Ah, sukaworra!"
I then moved on to snakes and asked if he was afraid of them.
"No. I think they are very cute."
Surely, I thought, he's misunderstood me. "Snake," I repeated, and I turned my arm into a striking cobra. "Horrible. Dangerous. Snake."
"No," he said. "The only thing I am afraid of is moutha."
"The snake's mouth?"
"No," he said. "moutha. I maybe saying it wrong, but moutha. Moutha."
I was on the verge of faking it when he pulled out an electronic dictionary and typed in the word he was looking for, ga, which translates, strangely enough, to "moth."
"You're afraid of moths?"
He nodded yes and winced a little.
"But nobody's afraid of moths."
"I am," he whispered, and he looked behind us, as if afraid that one might be listening.
"Are you afraid of butterflies too?" I asked.
The young man cocked his head.
"Butterfly," I said, "colorful cousin of the moth. Are you afraid that he too will attack?"
Hugh overhead me saying this and turned around.
"What the hell are you two talking about?"
And Student No. 2 said, "The wildness."

"Sorcery in the Alleys" by Marise Ghorayeb

"We were gathered in a room on a planet I would rather not have to spell and you would rather not have to pronounce. This place was in the center of our universe and a good meeting place for us. We have another room like it on Earth, which I am more familiar with since I do most of my work there, but this room has been made to fit all the tastes of different species, a difficult task.

The room was a reasonably large, but crowded nonetheless. The walls were a bright creamish white and the room was filled with tall metal tables and high chairs that matched. It was actually rather bland with the exception of a large blue and red painting that covered the back wall.

I got up when everyone was settled down, and started waiting for everyone to be quiet. They hushed quietly.

'We have a huge problem and I am here to ask for your help. We have a couple of special guests first of all sitting in the back there. They come from other worlds to help us. Considering our problem could make the wizards more powerful then we imagine, this is their problem too. We are glad to have you, and I would give more proper introductions if I could. ' "

Excerpt from pg. 23-24

From Netherland by Joseph O' Neill:
"Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing."

Hah! Good one, #247 msf59. My wife undoubtedly would say that the certain age came early in my case. And some of the warps and creaks can be pretty stubborn.

jnwelch- warps & creaks, sums us up pretty well, huh?
I just started The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and I immediately found it entrancing. I have to share an earlier passage:
"Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later- no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget- we will return. For me those enchanted pages will always be the ones I found among the passages of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books."
I'm sorry it got a bit lengthy, but I couldn't stop!

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place
And death’s my destination.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Also from another tome(can you guess which?)

"Good and Evil are surprisingly black and white, its man's muddling desires that shades the grey."

Its quite a famous quote from a well known author

"Their happiness was then complete. Their husbands would not have known them. They left off talking. They ceased to mention heaven. They were just cups of acceptance."

taken from Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April

This scrap of paper in my hand makes me feel poor in a way like I just heard of rich. Jealous. What kind of person would thow it away? I tell myself that's a load of crap and reach for the Hefty that lies open at my side. But I can't drop that letter in to mess with the soggy plastic bags and year-old candy wrappers. I reach for the other bag I've been dragging around, the one with my clothes, and fish out my hand-tooled wallet. I smooth and fold the letter, and tuck it next to Father Tom's money. Then I slip the wallet inside the back pocket of my uniform and button the flap.

Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris.