Hey, we can all quote them, practically verbatim. A passage or stanza that is either stunningly brilliant or stupefyingly dumb. Whatever you like.

This could be an extension or sidebar to the "I wish I'd written that" thread which dropped off the radar screen (unfairly) awhile back.

I'll start off with one I know Ian would get to right away, the first sentence from Anthony Burgess' peerless EARTHLY POWERS:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me."

Message edited by its author, Feb 3, 2009, 11:06am.

Which obviously evokes (especially talking of Nabokov):

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

Well Cliff and Ian are most likely going to roll their eyes at me, but Austen did write one of the best opening lines ever

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Pride and Prejudice.

Message edited by its author, Feb 3, 2009, 11:26am.

Ah, one of the all-time classics, Anna.

Here are a few more:

"Thoughts are real," he said. "Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future."

-Paul Auster, ORACLE NIGHT

"The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea."

"There was the doorway with the green curtains across it. Never sit with your back to a green curtain. It always turns out badly. Something always happens. Who had I said that to? A girl with a gun."

-two quotes from Raymond Chandler's LADY IN THE LAKE

"(In 2003) scientists in Cambridge claimed to have found the deepest note ever detected, a B-flat emanating from a black hole, 57 octaves below the one in the middle of a piano. Is there a siren song calling us to space?"

-Andrew Smith, MOONDUST

"History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy & folly."

-Ryszard Kapuscinski, SHADOW OF THE SUN

Message edited by its author, Feb 3, 2009, 11:35am.

Honest, my feelings toward Austen are (I admit) the products of my own stupidity.

That's a terrific opening line...

3: And one of the most often parodied.

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

Gravity's Rainbow

See Cliff, read P&P it's full of good humour.
Anna, all the best ones are.

Even though it's a play/movie the screenplay made for some great reading as well as some great quotes;

'What do I think of history? Well it's just one fucking thing after another isn't it?' Rodge, the History Boys. Which I try to keep in mind as I mindlessly toil through my degree.

'I'm small, I'm jewish, I'm homosexual and I life in Sheffield. I'm Fucked.' Posner, The history boys.

Which reminds me I haven't watched that in a few months...

100 Best First Lines from Novels:

http://americanbookreview.org/100BestLin...

Great link, Karl...

"Manuscripts don't burn." The Master and Margarita

(Incidentally, that's also the title of a collection of Bulgakov's letters and, as I recall, excerpts from Yelena Sergeyevna's diaries, Manuscripts Don't Burn.)

Message edited by its author, Feb 3, 2009, 1:03pm.

"True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals." -- Crying of Lot 49

"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

John Varley, Steel Beach

"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Message edited by its author, Feb 3, 2009, 6:46pm.

Those...were...GREAT.

Cold is the orgre which drives all beautiful things into hiding. Below the surface of a frost-bound garden there lurk hidden bulbs which are only biding their time to burst forth in a riot of laughing color (unless the gardner has planted them upsidedown) but shivering Nature dare not put forth her flowers till the ogre has gone. Not otherwise does cold supress love. A man in an open cart on an English Spring night may continue to be in love, but love is not the emotion uppermost in his bosom. It shrinks within him and waits for better times.

from SOMETHING NEW
by P.G. Wodehouse

Me like Wodehouse. Him very funny.

Here, here.

First line from one of my two or three favorite novels, Wilton Barnhardt's GOSPEL:

"I had lost my faith, Josephus."

"Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks . . . ." Histories

For some reason, 21 reminded me of the introductory spiel in Star Trek.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita." - Lolita

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" - and tore it up.

The adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be indistinguishable from magic."

no, wait...

Ah, Ian, that was good.

Ayn Rand, right? Thought you'd slip that one past us...

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

"Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon, lord of men and brilliant Achilles..."

-THE ILIAD (Robert Fagles translation)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

That just KILLS me. When the clocks are striking thirteen, you know that everything, everything, everything is wrong.

(And yes, I'm aware of the 24-hour/military time scheme, but I'm certain Orwell intended what I infer.)

That beginning...it almost simultaneously reveals a reassuring, commonplace quality (clocks striking) and a sudden, jarring strangeness ("thirteen"), readers swiftly realizing they are no longer on Earth Prime...or terra firma...

Absolutely brilliant.

Echoing another thread: words I definitely wish I'd written.

It must just be my recent re-reading of Catch-22, but I've got a slew of favorites from it. Here are a couple:

"They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?
Who else will go?"

"It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disapper somebody?"

"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action."

In the terraces we never opposed love. The way we viewed this question was that love must be pretty deeply rooted to have gone on for so long.
One would have to be very deep to tinker with so deep a root, deeper than we were. That is a prime feature in any place where there is a scarcity of work for the local men and women to do, a state which prevailed on a high plane indeed during the dark years now being spoken of.
also, love, properly used, keeps people warm. That is a fact of some importance when coal has to be considered as a part of the groceries. Also, love, possessing the power of making its subjects see things in a clearer light, creates a desire for beauty. This was intersting to us because if there was one thing the terraces lacked more than any other it was that very beauty.
Our group which met nightly on the wall at the bottom of our backyard was agreed that never had so little beauty been compressed into so large a space as we saw in the terraces. It was a clumsy bit of packaging all together. We took this in our solemn way to mean that when men consent to endure for too long the sadness of poverty and decline, beauty sees no point in staying, bows its head and goes. There was much poverty in the teraces, nearly as much as air, weather or life. It achieved a variety of flavors and shapes that did credit to our originality and patience. Beneath its layers beauty lay in a mess and, no doubt, very dead. Men, like artists who gallop after beauty, should make a new set of divining rods, find out where hell is and put poverty in. Then beauty, rising like a rainbow from man's new dreams, would be pervasive as the mist of pettiness among us now and come galloping after them for a change.

VENUS AND THE VOTERS
1947
Gwyn Thomas

>30 - although I didn't particularly enjoy that passage (IMO, it is a little cumbersome) I was intrigued by Gwyn Thomas (a new name to me).

I found this passage from his The Dark Philosophers, published 2 years before Venus; which seems to say the same thing more succinctly -

“We cursed within our own minds, the sterile cold and loneliness we had lived in for many years when misery and anger killed the music within us, and we thought sorrowfully of all those many voters lying around about us in the Terraces who had been made numb and stupid by poverty, dead even to the divine beauty created by man.”

Although I have mixed feelings about Harlan Ellison, the opening line to Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R. always makes me smile -

It was half-past September when the red phone rang.

.

Message edited by its author, Feb 5, 2009, 7:59am.

Re: the Ellison, kind of a 1984-ish homage going on there, methinks.

Never heard of Gwyn Thomas so that's a new one. Brief bio for the benefit of us philistines?

"A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer." -- Marcel Proust

He must have been talking about his cleaning woman since Proust was as gay as Tom Cruise.

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

"The surest road to salvation is traveling through the pit of desolation."

-Bruce Feiler (WHERE GOD WAS BORN)

"You will not see me at my last hour...surrounded with priests. I wish to die cradled upon the waves of the stormy sea or standing upon a mountain...my eyes not directed upwards. I know that my annihilation will be complete. Moreover, I shall expect no mercy."

-Lautreamont (MALDOROR)

"Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies...and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance."

-Paul Auster (MOON PALACE)

"Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you."

-Rumi

Message edited by its author, Feb 5, 2009, 10:17am.

'But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.'
- Boswell quoting Johnson

This one reveals a crack in my snobbish shell. It's from an 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter): "The dog didn't say a word all the way downtown."

It's the "all the way downtown" that fills me with glee.

Edited to add:

I restore my cracked snobshell with the following: "She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue." ("Eveline," from Joyce's Dubliners.) Mellifluous. Even musical. All those w's and v's.

Message edited by its author, Feb 5, 2009, 2:00pm.

VERY eclectic...good on ya.

More hard-boiled for ya:

"...I slipped into a stool between the bulldog and the only other two customers in the place, two out-of-work shade-tree mechanics who were discussing their lost unemployment checks, their latest DWI conviction, and the probable location of a 1957 Chevy timing chain. Their knotty faces and nasal accents belonged to another time, another place. The dust bowl '30's and a rattletrap, homemade Model T truck heading into the setting sun. As I sat down, they glanced at me with the narrow eyes of country people, looking me over carefully as if I were an abandoned wreck they planned to cannibalize for spare parts. I nodded blithely to let them know that I might be a wreck but I hadn't been totaled yet. They returned my silent greeting with blank eyes and thoughtful nods that seemed to suggest that accidents could be arranged."

-James Crumley, THE LAST GOOD KISS

The GREAT James Crumley, I should have said...

Message edited by its author, Feb 5, 2009, 5:14pm.

"The dust bowl '30's and a rattletrap, homemade Model T truck heading into the setting sub."

Where I live, we call that a setting hoagie.

Shit, sorry about that, I was typing fast, my sons had just arrived home from school...

"Mozart had the unique distinction, as everyone knows, of writing Koechels, instead of opuses, a thing no other composer has done before or since. Mozart's great popularity dates from the time that this absorbing fact was discovered, by some strange coincidence, by a man named Koechel." Gammond, the bluffer's guide to music

i'll next dictate AA Milne's wonderful lines on investing in SAfrican gold futures for the excitement of watching his flutter go up and down.

"His interest in people was purely theoretical." -- Middlemarch. I have personal reasons for loving this one, primarily that I finally have a nutshell explanation for how I operate in the human world. (I'm not Temple Grandin.)

This thread rules. I am constantly recalling more and more:

"Nobody did come, because nobody does." Jude the Obscure. So sad. Reminiscent of "Alone, alone, all, all alone." (Ancient Mariner.)

On a more cheerful note, "He lived in Sunnyside, Queens, and had been married for ten years to a very thin girl named Rose who suffered from sinus headaches, couldn't have children, and earned more money than he did by typing eighty-seven words a minute without missing a beat on her chewing gum." From "The B.A.R. Man," in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. Richard, I love you more and more every time I read you.

Glad to see Mr. Yates quoted here. Fine author...

Miss Scrawen, who wrote fiercely sensuous poetry and led a blameless life, merely displayed irritation; if you are methodical and virtuous in private you don't necessarily want everyone to know it.

- Saki - Tobermory

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be." -- Turn of the Screw

"Pride , old fellow , pride," replied Jingle, quite at his ease. "Wouldn't do--no go--caught a captain, eh?--ha! ha! very good--husband for daughter--bitter bit--make it public--not for worlds--look stupid--very!"

"Oh, of course," said Jingle. "Tall young man--old lover--Sidney Porkenham--rich--fine fellow--not so rich as captain, though?--turn him away--off with him--anything for captain--nothing like captain anywhere--all the girls--raving mad--eh, Job?"

The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens

I might not have the exchange exactly right as I can't find my copy of Catch 22 right now, but my favourite bit (and it's hard to pick one!) is when Yossarian is being questioned by the psychiatrist;
"Yossarian, what do you dream about?"
"Fish."
"And what do those fish remind you of?"
"Other fish"

I also love a line from Proust (can't remember which book); "gamey meat for the jaded palates of refined voluptuaries."

Message edited by its author, Feb 7, 2009, 2:39am.

"I had indeed a hair's-breadth escape; but, as luck would have it, Providence was on my side." Erewhon

"Little fools and young fools somehow seem to pass muster in this peculiar world, but to be old and a fool is a mistake which is difficult, if not impossible, to remedy." Australia Twice Traversed

"The men found the women's language impossible to learn, but the women managed the men's language." "This is a tribe called the Atarantes, and they are the only people we know of who do not have names." "After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons." Three from The Histories, the last quoting Croesus.

"Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge." "What is {war} but the getting together of quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, to keep the ambitious and turbulent within bounds?" Tristram Shandy

"I was too young to do any Work, being not above three Years old...." Moll Flanders

"Omen? omen? - the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads and give an old wives' darkling hint." Moby Dick

"So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines." On the Road

"He turned upon me, his eyes suddenly amazed and full of pain, with a bewildered, startled, suffering face, as though he had tumbled down from a star. Neither you nor I will ever look like this on any man. He shuddered profoundly, as if a cold finger-tip had touched his heart. Last of all he sighed." "He believed where I had already ceased to doubt." Lord Jim

"And the sense of security, even the most warranted, is a bad counsellor. It is the sense which, like the exaggerated feeling of well-being ominous of the coming on of madness, precedes the swift fall of disaster." "Men, professors, or coal-heavers are easily deceived; they even have an extraordinary knack of lending themselves to deception, a sort of curious and inexplicable propensity to allow themselves to be led by the nose with their eyes open." Mirror of the Sea

"The Prince made athe tour of the forest ballroom, stopping to speak to the old Chiefs one after the other. He spoke to them in Swahili." That was the Prince of Wales. Out of Africa

"Free, and to none accountable, preferring / Hard liberty before the easy yoke / Of servile pomp." Paradise Lost

"The scheme of escape hit upon by the convict intellect was simply this. Three men being together, lots were drawn to determine who should be murdered. The drawer of the longest straw was the 'lucky' man. He was killed. The drawer of the next longest straw was the murderer. He was hanged. The unlucky one was the witness. He had, of course, an excellent chance of being hung also, but his doom was not so certain, and he therefore looked upon himself as unfortunate." For the Term of His Natural Life

"But, lo! and just as the coach drove off, Miss Sharp put her pale face out of the window and actually flung the book back into the garden." The book was the abridged version of Johnson's Dictionary. Vanity Fair

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Quoting Johnson in Life of Johnson

"I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar...." Twilight of the Idols

"'Bad, bad girl,' said Lo comfortably. 'Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching.'" Lolita

"He developed a new theory that the war was a great blessing for humanity, because in the battles not only good people were shot but lots of rogues and bastards too." "First we defeat our enemy, then we pursue him on and on and in the end we can't run fast enough to get away from him." "'Where am I?' / 'You have the honor to be in a brothel, sir. God moves in a mysterious way.'" The Good Soldier Svejk

"Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers." Buck Mulligan speaking to Stephen in Ulysses

Wow, Snick, that's impressive. Bloody fine stuff...

Oddly, while I was try to put those back on the shelf, Plato, Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Ernest Shackelton, Raymond Chandler, Napolean, R.L.Stevenson, Noam Chomsky, James Thurber, Henry Adams, Lewis Caroll, Wilkie Collins, Hardy, Thackeray, Fielding, Eliot, Waugh , Stevenson, Heyerdahl, Goldsmith and Buchan all fell at my feet. And Homer, Iliad and Odyssey both.

"Well, I too would be capable of killing for a book."
"I wouldn't recommend it. That's how it starts. Murder doesn't seem like a big deal, but then you end up lying, voting in elections, things like that"

Perez-Reverte - The Club Dumas

Ha! 51 is great. I had real fun reading that book.

The Club Dumas is a great read. Here is another quote from it:

"The information a book provides is an objective given. It may be presented by a malevolent author who wishes to mislead, but it is never false. It is the reader who makes a false reading."

This book is surely a popular one for LT since it is about people whose very reality, and lives are in books.

Umeberto Eco even makes an appearance in the novel!

"Look who's arrived. you know him don't you? Professor of Semiotics in Bologna."

The only Perez-Reverte i didn't like was the 3rd in the Alatriste sequence. The 4th and latest to be translated, at least, is a very nice return to form The King's Gold. I'd guess the queen of the south and the flanders panel are my personal favorites, but i've enjoyed all his translated works except the sun over Breda.

I heard somewhere that The Club Dumas was the intellectual's Da Vinci Code. I loved the Ninth Gate: Depp, Langella, and Lena Olin as the "inconsolable widow."

Dean Corso: It's an impressive collection. You have some very rare editions here. Are you sure you want to sell them all?

Old Man's Son: They're of no use to father. Not anymore. Not since he's been this way. His library was his whole world. Now it's just a feeble memory.

TITUS is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other--other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is a CHILD.
A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood.
The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter "Weep." Of blood that mourns when sere laws croak "Rejoice!" O little revolution in great shades.

Mervyn Peake
GORMENGHAST
1950

Ahh, I read 3/4 of Gormenghast about three years ago, and then lost the book when it was inside a backpack that was stolen. I haven't finished it yet, but I periodically feel a strong urge to do so.

There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the ACTUAL leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.

Let's see most high fantasy freaks take a crack at Peake.

After immersing themselves in crap like Jordan et all, old Merv would make their brains (what little they have) explode in a shower of pink mist...

The fantasy fans I know of hate Peake. Then again, they are barely sentient philistines who have their minds boggled if they encounter writing that doesn't resemble a D&D schematic.

All together now, a dwarf and a wizard and a champion and a princess ... May all your cliches get double hit points.

BEGINNING this book (not as they say 'book' in our trade-- they mean magazine), beginning this book, I should like if I may, I should like, if I may (that is the way Sir Phoebus writes), I should like then to say: Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends.
And for why?
Read on, read on and work it out for yourself.

NOVEL ON YELLOW PAPER
or WORK IT OUT FOR YOURSELF

Stevie Smith
1936

61: Yeah, I don't know why people read all of those, they are so derivative. My son is reading a "classic" fantasy series that was written in the 1990s. Involving elves and orcs. It's by R. A. Salvatore and his bio in the back states that someone gave him LOTR when he was in college and he immediately switched majors and started writing this stuff. It shows.

62: That reminds me of the rhyme that Eeyore wrote to say goodbye to Christopher Robin.

Christopher Robin is going
At least I think he is
Where?
Nobody knows
But he is going--
I mean he goes
(To rhyme with knows)
Do we care ?
(To rhyme with where)
We do
Very much
(I haven't got a rhyme for that
"is" in the second line yet.
Bother.)
(Now I haven't got a rhyme for
bother. Bother.)
Those two bothers will have
to rhyme with each other
Buther
The fact is this is more difficult
than I thought,
I ought--
(Very good indeed)
I ought
To begin again,
But it is easier
To stop
Christopher Robin, good-bye
I
(Good)
I
And all your friends
Sends--
I mean all your friend
Send--
(Very awkward this, it keeps
going wrong)
Well, anyhow, we send
Our love
END

Sorry that was not in the poetry thread!

Anna, I know what you mean. It seems like their critical faculties, if any, are so pedestrian and reductive. There's more to High Fantasy than Tolkien and Peake. What really goads me is when people talk about Fantasy based on "non-Western traditions." Is it me, or does it sound like "Token Black" or "Token Asian" to you? It ends up devolving into Ethnic Mad-Libs (Robert Howard is a multiple offender. In his defense, he invented the barbarian genre.)

In full disclosure, I read a lot of Warhammer 40K novels. But to their credit, they have been expanding the Universe, occasionally subverting the genre along the way. The Tau, a newly introduced race, show the influence of anime and act like Communists. They've also discontinued the Squat race (dwarfs in space) because people found it ridiculous.

Since I like variety and extremes, my response to High Fantasy is usually, "So, that's it then?"

Fallen empire, wizards, quest narrative. Rinse, lather, repeat. It's not the genre conventions and tropes are all that bad, it's just they have become so predictable and rote. You don't need a million monkeys at a million typewriters. A dozen or so could produce the same result just fine.

at least we can call it love. love is the END.

Mr. Jones closed not his eyes during all the former part of the night, not owing to any uneasiness which he conceived at being disappointed by Lady Bellaston; nor was Sophie herself, though most of his waking hours were justly to be charged to her account, the present cause of dispelling his slumbers. In fact, poor Jones was one of the best-natured fellows alive and had all that weakness which is called compassion, and which distinguishes this imperfect character from that noble firmness of mind which rolls a man, as it were, within himself and, like a polished bowl, enables him to run through the world without being once stopped by the calamities which happen to others. He could not help, therefore, compassionating the situation of poor Nancy, whose love for Mr. Nightingale seemed to him so apparent that he was astonished at the blindness of her mother, who had more than once the preceeding evening remarked to him the great change in the temper of her daughter, "who from being," she said, "one of the liveliest, merriest girls in the world was, on a sudden, become all gloom and melancholy.

TOM JONES
Containing a scene which we doubt not will affect all our readers
Henry Fielding

" . . . and Will Maidenwood, the editor of Woman."

Willa Cather - "Flavia and Her Artists" from The Troll Garden.

Loving this thread. This passage is a bit long, but maybe it'll strike a note with creators and lovers of great art--it's practically a manifesto for me:

"He knew that even the memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable scale of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard still almost entirely unknown on which, here and there only, separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe, have been found by a few great artists who do us the service, by awakening in us something corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety, is hidden unbeknownst to us within that great unpenetrated and disheartening darkness of our soul which we take for emptiness and nothingness . . . Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind in the same way as certain other notions without equivalents, like the notion of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, which are the rich possessions that diversify and ornament the realms of our inner life. Perhaps we will lose them, perhaps they will fade away, if we return to nothingness. But as long as we are alive, we can no more eliminate our experience of them than we can our experience of some real object, than we can for example doubt the light of the lamp illuminating the metamorphosed objects in our room whence even the memory of the darkness has vanished. In this way Vinteuil's phrase had, like some theme from Tristan, for example, which also represents to us a certain emotional acquisition, espoused our mortal condition, taken on a human quality that was rather touching. Its destiny was linked to the future, to the reality of our soul, of which it was one of the most distinctive, the best differentiated ornaments. Maybe it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we will have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable."
--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

And just to get at Cliff, here's some Robertson Davies (from Fifth Business):

"My nickname was Deacon, because of my Testament reading. It was useless to explain that I read it not from zeal but curiosity and that long passages of it confirmed my early impression that religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way. (Later I was able to say that they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and that psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification; but while I was a young soldier I had no vocabulary for such argument, though I sensed the truth of it.)"

One more, from Mia Couto's Sleepwalking Land:

"The authorities even attempted to stop the little boats, but as the administrator wisely pointed out, the obsessions of people who live by what they can see, unaware of the future world, are well known. The ex-secretary Assane, still waving his hands, recalled the administrator as being almost on the brink of tears as he spoke:
'Sometimes I despair of you, popular masses. I think to myself: it's not worth it, it's like asking a cashew tree not to twist its branches. But our fate is that of a mat: history will wipe its feet on our backs.' "

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

and

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may
triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

"Sonny's Blues"
James Baldwin

#71: Exactly! I happened to read the Proust and Baldwin passages fairly close on the heels of each other, and both have been turning in my head since...

Ha! When I read the Proust, the Baldwin passage jumped into my head. I've been meaning to post that for awhile. Great posts, Medellia12!

"In the work of Gustave Moreau, going for its conception altogether beyond the meagre facts supplied by the New Testament, Des Esseintes saw realized at last the Salomé, weird and superhuman, he had dreamed of. No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of Troy of the old Classic fables, all who come near her, all who see her, all who touch her.

"So understood, she belonged to the ancient Theogonies of the Far East; no longer she drew her origin from Biblical tradition; could not even be likened to the living image of Babylonish Whoredom, or the Scarlet Woman, the Royal Harlot of Revelations, bedecked like her with precious stones and purple, tired and painted like her; for she was not driven by a fateful power, by a supreme, irresistible force, into the alluring perversities of debauch."

-- Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans

I just finished reading Willa Cather's short story "Flavia and Her Artists". It contains one of the best put downs of self-importance I've ever read. I thought I should post it here, but then I started thinking: how would I introduce the speech in such a way the reader feels the disgust inherent in it? The organic completeness of the story makes it impossible to extract portions without doing violence to the portion extracted.

Can we do our favorite quotations justice by removing them from the native soil which nurtures them into the fullness of meaning?

The quotation in question follows:

Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wine glass, gazing down the table at one face after another and studying the various degrees of self-consciousness they exhibited. Imogen's eyes followed his, fearfully. When a lull came in the spasmodic flow of conversation, Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked deliberately, "As for M. Roux, his very profession places him in that class of men whom society has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept."

Quoting Robertson Davies in my presence is cruel and unusual punishment. But the long quote from Proust absolves you (although your fingers likely ached like heck afterward)...

------- * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** *
-------You shall see the very place, Madam, said my uncle Toby.
Mrs. Wadman blushed----looked towards the door-turned pale---blushed slightly again---recovered her natural color----blushed worse than ever; which for the sake of unlearned reader, I translate thus----
"L--D! I cannot look at it---
What would the world say if I looked at it?
I should drop down if I looked at it----
I wish I could look at it---
There can be no sin in looking at it.
----I will look at it."
Whilst all this was running through Mrs. Wadman's im-
agination, My uncle Toby had risen from the sofa, and
got to the other side of the parlor door, to give Trim
an order about it in the passage----
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ------I believe it is in the
garret, said my uncle Toby----I saw it there and please your Honor, this morning, answered Trim---then prithee, step directly for it, Trim, said my uncle Toby, and bring it in to the parlor.
The corporal did not approve of the orders, but most
cheerfully obeyed them. The first was not an act of his will ----the second was; so he put on his Montero
cap, and went as fast as his lame knee would let him.
My uncle Toby returned to the parlour, and sat himself down again upon the sofa.
------You shall lay your finger upon the place---said
my uncle Toby.-----I will not touch it, however, quoth Mrs. Wadman to herself.
This requires a second translation:-----it shows what
little knowlege is got by mere words----we must go up to the first springs.
Now in order to clear up the mist which hangs upon these three pages, I must endevour to be as clear as possible myself.
Rub your hands thrice across your foreheads----blow
your noses----cleanse your emunctories---sneeze, my good people!----God bless you----
Now give me all the help you can.

Message edited by its author, Feb 11, 2009, 4:46am.

There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that men may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.

Arthur Machen

That sounds almost exactly like H.P Lovecraft.

Well, ol' H.P. knew of folks like Machen and R.W. Chambers...

Dear HP,

Can you make your books more positive? Maybe include a love interest? And we would better appreciate your work if it had an "up" ending. Have you written anything about vampires? We're interested in that.

Signed,

Idiot Publishers.

Dear Leo Rosten,

Can you make your work less Jewwy.

Signed,

Idiot Publishers.

Message edited by its author, Feb 13, 2009, 11:31pm.

When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake--not a very big one.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

"To hold a pen is to be at war." -- Voltaire

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." -- Nietzsche

"I started to write The Name of the Rose in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk." -- Umberto Eco

"Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory." -- Diderot

"A culture is made -- or destroyed -- by its articulate voices." -- Ayn Rand

The Eco quote is sublime.

Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan--and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.

THE HORROR AT RED HOOK
H.P. Lovecraft

Don't really care for Twain, but:

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No answer.

-THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
Mark Twain

>84

Can't help but think that Nietzsche quote explains a lot about George W. Bush.

>87,

Tom Sawyer sucked big-time, and his jump-the-shark entry at the end of Huckleberry Finn really killed that wonderful odysseyan adventure for me.

Ahh, but Twain's short stories! Not very snobbish, but oh such sublime, quaint Americana!

"And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an ax one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalist, wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the legislature."

-- The Story of the Bad Little Boy

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collies to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

-Mark Twain on "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," the reading of which is all that made a college course in which we read three books by Cooper bearable.

I looked at him , lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiatic, fabulous. His very existance was improbable, inexplicable, and all together bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain--why he did not instantly disappear. 'I went a little farther--till I had gone so far that I don't know how I'll ever get back.

HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad

>87, 89
Twain wrote some very, very good stuff. You never get it in high school or college. I do think that Huck Finn has its good points too.
Among Twain's stuff that hasn't made it into the canon, there's a long story about a man who gets lost in an extended dream or hallucination. (He fantasizes that he's a sea captain? Does anyone know this one?) It's an epistemological story, very Philip K. Dick in a way.

There's also a nice story about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. IIRC, some passages are quite funny and some are quite beautiful.

This makes me want to dig up that lost Twain collection and re-read it.

The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Priceless.

Ah, that's it! Thanks!

Him:

"She has littered the whole estate with excreable names and offensive signs:
THIS WAY TO THE FALLS
THIS WAY TO GOAT ISLAND
CAVE OF THE WINDS THIS WAY"

Her:
He talks very little. Perhaps it is because he is not bright..."

Gawd, this must have been incredibly funny stuff back when it was published. Still is.

PROLOGUE

Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. If, in this book, I choose to act in the ambivalent character of pessimist and optimist, it is because mankind plays a similar contradictory role upon the stage of life. Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggests it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there.

THE INVISIBLE PYRAMID
Loren Eiseley

For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Chapter civ - The Fossil Whale - Moby Dick, Melville

"That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear."

Chapter iv - Blood Meridian

Message edited by its author, Feb 16, 2009, 3:57pm.

. . . Bashir was struck silent by the images of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building.
As he studied the screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. "I'm a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of the desk. "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

--Three Cups of Tea

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

-Slaughterhouse-Five

Sounds like a description of Heaven or the best damn rave ever ;)

lol now that's pretty good Hair & Hairstyles Advice Guy

‘‘Crikey!’’ said Philbrick. ‘‘Loonies! This is where I shoot.’’

Nothing I treasure much after finishing the whole thing, but its first line caught my eye while browsing through a friends shelves:

"It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back." Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi.

It seemed so bare and at the same time heartfelt, just stating the truth.

"God is a comedian playing to an audience afraid to laugh." Voltaire.

"—the first drops of rain, like a thousand eyeholes opening on the white mask of sand, come winking down and the eelgrass sways to a soundless tune. Which brings to mind a bit about Singers of echoes and Echoers of songs: The notion of Dance. Not the weekend dance in the Saturday night sense, where you two-step to music you've heard before and always know – even if only in a cellular way – just about where your two-step is headed… but the Daily Dance with the wilder step, to a tune as soundless as the eelgrass tune, to an echo of a song still unechoed. A dance where you can really never have much notion of where you are headed.

You can trip off to places so wild and wiggy that you don't know where you are until you get back. And sometimes not even know you've tripped off at all because you never know you've left…." Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

Good one from the Merry Prankster...

God I loved Sometimes a Great Notion. I have to re-read that one of these days.

That bit in Ulysses where Bloom amuses himself with the waiter pun. I can't remember it exactly but it goes along the lines of:

Waits while you wait
He's waiting while your waiting
I wait here while he waits and I'm waiting.
Hehehe

And the bit in the second chapter where Deasy starts banging on about the Jews, it's like; 'Why did Ireland never persecute the Jews, because she never let them in.'

I can't get that out of my head. What a bastard.

Message edited by its author, Mar 30, 2009, 11:33am.

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a
woman . . . She is an evil of nature . . . Women
are more credulous; and since the chief aim of
the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he rather
attacks them . . . Women . . . are intellectually like
children . . . A woman always deceives.

Something from Brother Heinrich Kramer, written c. 1486, explaining why most witches were women. The main reason was that "women are more carnal than men."

Given how he felt about women, I'd say it was a good thing he became a monk, except for that whole torturing people to get confessions thing.

Message edited by its author, Mar 30, 2009, 11:33am.

Reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon when the ugly, evil witch is transformed into a beautiful lady rabbit. As Bugs sashays off with her, he shrugs to the audience: "Yeah, sure, I know. But aren't they ALL witches underneath?"

I quoted that to my wife once and got turned into an artichoke for a week for my deft-defying display of humour...

Message edited by its author, Mar 30, 2009, 11:39am.

That reminds me of the scene in Bell, Book, and Candle in which Jimmy Stewart explains to his former fiancee that he was besotted by Kim Novak because she's a witch.

"Oh, Shep," she responds, "you just can't spell."

Kudos to your wife, Cliff!

108: I thought that part (about the waiter) was funny, too! Just read it about a week ago...

Right now I am at the part where it goes between a funny cliche-filled heroic narration and a conversation at a bar. It's a scream. Joyce really is a lot funnier than I thought.

(Edited to clarify which part I thought was funny - the part with Deasy definitely not)

Message edited by its author, Mar 30, 2009, 11:55am.

"Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down." -- Harold Blume (Bill Murray) from the movie Rushmore

112: wait until you get to the chapter set in the red light district. I forget the name it's been given. It becomes funny in a completely bizarre way. It's been ages since I read it so I can hardly remember it, but those waiter puns will probably never leave my mind for some reason.

If you like Joyce's humourous side you should check out At-Swim-Two-Birds, which reminds me of another line I'll never forget:

"A pint of porter is yer only man"

Message edited by its author, Apr 6, 2009, 10:37am.

Flann O'Brien. Yeah, after tackling Joyce, O'Brien is "yer only man".

'Ave a look:

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium...

Joyce was also a Svevo fan, as I recall:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Svevo

well, i'm terribly sentimental..but just started the wasted vigil about lost souls centered around an English MD who's lived most his life in rural Afghanistan. A Russian woman comes to his home/former perfume factory, looking for her brother who went awol from the Soviet army during the invasion. The opening lines describe her wandering through the home.

"Her mind is a haunted house." opens the book. Grabbed me, anyway.

Message edited by its author, Apr 9, 2009, 10:11pm.

The endings of:

Vanity Fair - "Vanitas Vanitatum - which of us has what he wants in this world. And, in having it, which of us is satisfied?"

The Female Man - "Rejoice, little book, for on that day we shall be free."

Ah, yes, the addiction of acquisition.

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
George Eliot
-
(found as the introductory epigram in the other side of silence - a desert mystery by Bill Pronzini.)