Tell me your favorite sentence(s) from a novel

From Love In the Ruins
Walker Percy

Post A Favorite Sentence(Or 2 Or 3)From Something You Are Reading(Or Have Read)

From "Blue highways", William Least-Heat Moon

Dune - F. Herbert

J. Joyce, Ulysses

"Even flowers are lacking, at this season, but for a small asphodel, grey in colour, whose nod is the nod of a ghost. The Greeks call it 'candle-flower.'"

I think any sentence with the word asphodel in it must be beautiful.

From "The Mill on the Floss" By George Eliot

Civil disorder can frequently lead to fantastic travel savings!

From "Let's Get Lost" By Craig Nelson

From "The Fish can Sing" by Halldor Laxness

"Where asphodels and bluebells blow" - Gerard Manley Hopkins
And it's in Cynghanedd! Say it out loud. Savour it!

Not from a novel, a stage-play:

"People are bloody ignorant apes." - Waiting for Godot, Beckett
(I quote that one a lot.)

ESTRAGON: We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?
VLADIMIR: Wait for Godot

If ever he had seen a fermenting aunt, this fermenting aunt was that fermenting aunt.
-PG Wodehouse- Galahad at Blandings.

'That,' I replied, cordially, 'is what it doesnt do nothing else but.'
-PG Wodehouse- Ukridge

I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.
-Joseph Heller- Something Happened

On the following morning she perceived, on awaking, that she had slept.
-Victor Hugo- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

I called you naughty darling because I do not like that other world.
-James Joyce- Ulysses

Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red jujubes white.
-James Joyce- Ulysses

Wanted a dog to pass the time.
-James Joyce- Ulysses

The dreamy cloudy gull
Waves o'er the waters dull.
-James Joyce- Ulysses

She was eating porridge, as if for a wager.
-Peter Fleming- The Kill

The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
-Joseph Heller- Catch-22

His hair went silver while mine just went.
-Stephen King- Dolan's Cadillac

...when Boomer danced he looked like a monkey on roller skates juggling razor blades in a hurricane.
-Tom Robbins- Skinny legs and all

Once in the chamber, they could have stood upright, but standing upright was not what they were there for.
-Tom Robbins- Skinny legs and all

The nuclear power station outside little Brownville, Nebraska, had a concrete floodwall plastered with mud-jug nests of cliff swallows, and the river was aflitter with their wings climbing into long ellipses, scimitar swoops down and around 'Nikawa', sunbeams gleaming off their iridescent heads as if that hot avian blood were radioactive.

River-Horse - William Least Heat Moon

J. W. von Goethe, Faust I

I would perhaps not like to share my (grate) taste with his (grate taste).

"The young, sturdy-looking son was telling something funny with his mouth full of kasha, and they were all laughing, the woman in the galoshes, who was pouring cabbage soup into a bowl, laughing most merrily of all."

/Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina/

"He was a magician with no magic, and that was no one at all."

And I also liked this one:

"I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. Also to find a way of starting a conversation."

Rafael Sabitini - Scaramouche

What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., RotundaWard, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries ofdeceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot,registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat.Plamtroo.
-James Joyce- Ulysses

In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabakov- Lolita

Our knowledge of each other is total. You are I and you, and you and I am you.
-Mario Vargas Llosa- In Praise of the stepmother

People's people generally want people to marry people people don't want to marry.
-PG Wodehouse- The Girl on the Boat

There were fools who talked to you about willpower and the struggle for life. Hadn't they ever looked at an animal or a tree?
-Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea

I for my part live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anybody, I receive nothing, I give nothing.
-Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea

he knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
-Joseph Heller- Catch-22

The reason of your unreasonable usage of my reason, does so enfeeble my reason, that I have reason to expostulate with your beauty.
-Miguel de Cervantes- Don Quixote

The most time-efficient way to say no to something is to say yes, and then never do it.
-Scott Adams- The Joy of Work

What really is my favourites is something else I don't know. Something from 'Sirens', probably, in fact. The wee 3line para about Miss Douce curling a gold hair as she sauntered sadly: that will do.

Virginia Woolf, THE YEARS.

-Samuel Beckett
Mercier and Camier

or the sentence which follows it:

Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently i have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon-- for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

(1992 Penguin U, 472.)

The organism, its dissolution, the indestructibility of matter, the law of conservation of enery, evolution --- these were the words that had replaced his former faith. These words and the concepts associated with them were very useful for intellectual purposes, but they made no contribution to life, and Levin suddenly felt he was in the position of a man who had exchanged a warm fur caot for a muslin blouse, and who the first time finds himself in the frost is persuaded beyond question, not by arguments, but by the whole of his being, that he's no better than naked and is inevitably bound to perish miserably.

**
It's pretty depressing, huh?

"Sweet raindrops cried for me on my face" (sorry for not being able to render de "Pluie_Pleu.._Pour" sound of quietly falling droplets....)

Marcel Pagnol "A la gloire de mon pere"
...the same who spoke about cicadas'copper sound: "le son cuivré des cigales"...That copper is magic: you feel heat, sundown, metal, you see France's Provence...

Return of the Native
-Thomas Hardy

... [Her] firmest London was a template of childhood reading.

She could see it in her mind. It seethed with that vitality particular to stories. The swallow in her bird's-eye view circled about in haphazard fashion, admiring her ur-London. It included Primrose Hill, where the Twilight Barking of 'One Hundred and One Dalmations' started. Here was a street in Chelsea called Cherry Tree Lane, along whose sidewalks the perennial English nanny-goddess Mary Poppins hustled her charges. Here was Paddington Station, in whose airy concourse a bear called Paddington had been lost, then found. Here was Kensington Gardens, Rackham's bleak version, with sprites and root goblins just out of sight, and Peter Pan, the original lost and abandoned child, a baby dressed in oak leaves, still crouching there even when thousands of mourners were depositing floral bouquets at the death of Princess Diana.

London was a trove of the magic of childhoood, for anyone who had read as obsessively as [she] had done before the age of twelve. Pull back just a bit, and more of England became implicated: a bit of river out toward Oxford, on which a rat and mole were busy messing about in a boat. Peter Rabbit stealing under some stile in the Lake District. Somewhere on this island, was it in Kent, the Hundred Aker Wood, with those figures who have yet to learn that sawdusty toys die deaths as certainly as children do. The irrepressible Camelot, always bursting forth out of some hummock or other. Robin Hood in his green jerkin, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and just underneath it all, places only slightly less England, the dreary improbabilities of Alice's Wonderland, the bosky dells of the theocracy of Narnia, the wind-tortured screes and wastes of Middle-earth.

Gregory Maguire - Lost (I detested the rest of the book, though.)

You cannot talk about real things, there are no words for genuine despair, there are not even tears, there is only a heavenly numbness for which to pray and upon that gray curtain words may dance as words were intended to, fans and pretty masks put up to shield the heart.

Dawn Powell - Come Back to Sorrento

From Walker Percy's The Moviegoer

from dawn powell's turn, magic wheel

'I've enjoyed hanging around in rooms doing nothing much, and look, I get to do it after I die.'"

Stiff - Mary Roach

Not only the best sentence (OK, two sentences) but also the best first lines of any novel ever.

from charlotte bronte's shirey

from charlotte bronte's shirley

Catch-22 again. (It's the crack of noon that really does it for me.)

-- Albert Camus, The Fall

"I often changed parts, but it was always the same play."

-- Albert Camus, The Fall

Our past is our only knowledge, and, good or ferocious, it is, for sublime or baleful purposes, the sole viaticum of the spirit. We can digest our childhood but never our present deeds, because no one knows what he is doing while he is doing it. The present is an absolute sphinx to men. Had Peter really known that he was walking on water, he could not have done it, for every act, small or great, is a veiled trance.

-Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh

Had I criminal inclinations, I would have ravished any Helen or even Webster's "old morphewed lady." Whoring is as natural as rain, snow and defecating. The practices of Venus Illegitima, the goddess of various turpitudes, is the way of all flesh, and those who pluck down the bawdy house and banish the prostitute have made it a peril for a woman to walk in the streets in the evening. Let him who can keep his pudendum on a leash for seventy rueful years cast the first stone; I swear by Abraham's codpiece which lies with Sarah in Hebron that either he has no genitals or is a barefaced liar. Meanwhile, blessed be Saint Scrotum, hallow the name of Father Prepuce and Friar Priapus, for they have been martyred by the beadle and honest folk. Absolute continence gives us chilblains, the quartan ague and the vapors. Chastity is 79 degrees north latitude, and many an imprudent explorer has lost all his parts in that frozen terrain.

-ibid

I looked gauchely at the damp and mysterious grass on which I was destined shortly to end my life in highly confusing circumstances. - Ferdydurke

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

That would be a hell of a zoo.

The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

"The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind."
Douglas Adams

"I don't think ashtray," I said, "is a wholly satisfying rhyme for ashtray."
-Julian Barnes, Talking It Over

"The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers."
-Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

"a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor

"'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Going back to the guy who started the thread:

"Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks, as well as other things, are not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were needed to recover them."

-Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman.

"He was thinking out loud here."

― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 12 October 2005 22:33 (4 years ago) Bookmark

Can anyone tell me what this was from? Driving me mad.

oh wait, nevermind. infinite jest. thought so

"'Bring your own guts to a reasonable compass, and then I’ll engage we shall have room enough for us all.'"

that Tess quote is beautiful.

"Once at twilight he had lifted his baton, and at the first down-beat the moon had come out from behind a cloud like a schooner coming out from behind an iceberg, the gold of the sunlight upon its sails."

"The ladies seized each other's hands, kissed, and screamed, as boarding-school misses scream at a reunion shortly after graduation, before their mammas have yet had a chance to explain to them that the father of one of them is poorer and of lower rank than the father of the other."
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (Guerney trans.)

that's great

not a novel of course but these lines from the four quartets:

After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

and, tl;dr, but the first para of speak, memory showcases so much i love about nabokov:

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”

there's a feeling in gogol of incredibly acute observations of vanished types who might only have been apparent to a traveller in provincial russia before the emancipation of the serfs, endless dead souls granted fictive eternity. it's such a great book.

not really a novel but this may be my favorite passage ever:

"On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them."

not a novel but i guess we dont have an amy hempel thread? i <3 this sentence -

"I bought it for him with the applesauce money."

"You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck."

- Gringos by Charles Portis

"Life around me was a solemn dream and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city."

- From "The Crack-Up" by Fitzgerald, not a novel but an essay. I like this partially for the flow and partially for the sentiment - it's so simple and rhythmically perfect I think I memorized it the moment I read it.

Big fan of "The Crack-Up"

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."

—Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

The last sentence from Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavillon:

"I wanted to live"

Nothing too obvious but stuck w/me after all that went on..

Poe, on the bus, today - "I had walled the monster up within the tomb."

There are, of course, a ton of amazing sentences in Gravity's Rainbow, from the opening and onward, but somehow this one sticks with me:

'He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don't know about fireflies, which is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls'

from marguerite duras’s the square:
"But in what way were you happy? Like someone resting? Like someone who is cool again after having been very hot? Or happy as other people are happy every day?"
"More than that I think. Probably because I was unused to happiness. A great surge of feeling overwhelmed me, and I did not know what to do with it.”

from the introduction to richard kieckhefer’s magic in the middle ages (not a novel):
“Historians can set up all the conceptual walls they want, but they should not be surprised when medieval people pass through them freely, like ghosts.”

Marguerite Duras is killing me.

ooft, it looks like i have to read Duras.The kieckhefer is wonderful too.

yeah that duras passage is choice

"It was love at first touch rather than at first sight, for I had met her several times before without experiencing any special emotions; but one night as I was seeing her home, something quaint she had said made me stoop with a laugh and lightly kiss her on the hair - and of course we all know of that blinding blast which is caused by merely picking up a small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house: the soldier involved hears nothing; for him it is but an ecstatic soundless and boundless expansion of what had been during his life a pinpoint of light in the dark center of his being."

-- Nabokov, That In Aleppo once

(actually a short story not a novel but w/e)

the only reason why i then drank too much in the bar on the train was that i felt i might have a very severe attack, which would be even more upsetting for her; when i got back into our compartment at the first stop, i told her how happy i was to be going to balbec, that i was sure everything would come out right in the end, that i would pretty soon get used to living apart from my mother, that this was a pretty nice train, that the barman and the other railway people were such good fellows that i would not mind traveling this way often, so as to be able to enjoy their company again. all this good news did not appear to give my grandmother the same joy as it gave me.

my infinite jest one is "everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising towards what he wants to pull down."

Poe, on the bus, today - "I had walled the monster up within the tomb."

― movember spawned a nobster (Noodle Vague), Thursday, November 8, 2012 7:11 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is so gr8

man, that nabokov one. need to read some more nabokov

just look at the punctuation in that sentence - watch as it unfurls

i posted this a few months ago as i was reading it, but this is from turgenev's "first love". still haunts me:

What I was feeling was so new and so sweet.... I sat still, hardly looking round and not moving, drew slow breaths, and only from time to time laughed silently at some recollection, or turned cold within at the thought that I was in love, that this was she, that this was love. Zinaïda’s face floated slowly before me in the darkness — floated, and did not float away; her lips still wore the same enigmatic smile, her eyes watched me, a little from one side, with a questioning, dreamy, tender look ... as at the instant of parting from her. At last I got up, walked on tiptoe to my bed, and without undressing, laid my head carefully on the pillow, as though I were afraid by an abrupt movement to disturb what filled my soul....

"Yes, your mother was my best friend in all the world."

Another Nabokov:

“Some people — and I am one of them — hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”

from Pnin

Osmond's beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond's beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

Currently obsessing over this line from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:

"In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice tray and that would have been the end of all our troubles."

Bun is such a sad word, is it not? And man is not much better, is it?

from pessoa's book of disquiet:

"The smallest episode - a change of light, the crumpled fall of a dead leaf, the petal that drops off and commits yellowcide, the voice on the other side of the wall or the footsteps of the person behind the voice next to those who should be listening to the voice, the half-open gate to the old estate, the patio that opens with an arch onto the houses heaped up in the moonlight - all these things, which do not belong to me, tie up my sensory meditation with cords of resonance and nostalgia. In each one of these sensations I am someone else, I renew myself painfully in each indefinite impression."

not a novel but gibbon:

The ancient dialects of Italy, the Sabine, the Etruscan, and the Venetian, sank into oblivion; but in the provinces, the east was less docile than the west to the voice of its victorious preceptors. This obvious difference marked the two portions of the empire with a distinction of colours, which, though it was in some degree concealed during the meridian splendour of prosperity, became gradually more visible as the shades of night descended upon the Roman world.

The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [Brief], the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [Sudden], and the emperor of the central region was called Hun-tun [Chaos]. Shu and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. "All men," they said, "have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn't have any. Let's try boring him some!"

Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died.

南海之帝为倏，北海之帝为忽，中央之帝为混沌。倏与忽时相遇于混沌之地，混沌待之甚善。倏与忽谋报混沌之德，曰：人皆有七窍，以视听食息，此独无有，尝试凿之。日凿一窍，七日而混沌死。

Transgression. That is legalism. There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all.

Avoid transgression. How's that for advice.

from Kipling's Without Benefit of Clergy:

Two months later, as the Deputy had foretold, Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil. On the heels of the spring reapings came a cry for bread, and the Government, which had decreed that no man should die of want, sent wheat. Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass. It struck a pilgrim gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine. Many died at the feet of their god; the others broke and ran over the face of the land carrying the pestilence with them. It smote a walled city and killed two hundred a day. The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out the dead and the dying. They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Englishmen shied at the corpses in the grass. The rains did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man should escape death by hiding in her.

... "For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?" In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Earle would have been much less angry if he could have thought of a snappy comeback.

He heaped his desk pell-mell with humanists, philosophers, and poets; he went to the Print Room to see engravings of Marcantonio; and he tried to understand Machiavelli. Gradually his work exerted a soothing influence on him. He forgot his own personality by immersing it in that of others - which is perhaps the only way to avoid suffering from it.

"And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted." - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." - Robert E. Howard, one of the Conan stories but I don't remember which one

To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely.