What's your favorite lines in a book you've read? Doesn't have to be your favorite book, just a line that made an impression on you.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
Gravity's Rainbow
Sound, you've reminded me I need to get back to that series.
Thomas Pynchon. Did I forget that part? Hehe
I have yet to finish the book, I must admit, although I know more people have tried than completed it.
Some of you will not like them, but I ask you to consider the wise words of that forceps philosopher, Robert Gilmore KcKinnell: "While it would be inappropriate to dedicate a vade mecum to a group of cold-blooded vertebrates, perhaps a kind word would not be out of order."*
*Content-mongers and lords of the world are invited to visit the treatise itself: Cloning: Nuclear Transplantation in Amphibia — A Critique of Results Obtained with the Technique to Which Is Added a Discourse on the Methods of the Craft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), pp. 172–3.
--- from the preface to William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories. (Not a true "favorite" because I just got the book, but this passage stood out.)
"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."
--Chuck Palahniuk-- Fight Club
@MES --- Another "rainbow" book. We must be on the same "wavelength."
*tee-hee*
I noticed that! Yours sounds like a challenging read!
@jonathan - Speak for yourself!
How about favorite line in whatever I'm currently reading? Only because my memory is shot for remembering lines. Or actually I have highlighted lines on the e-reader, which is just the coolest function (I'd loathe to mark up a real book.)
"These, and many other of the best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false . . . the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be." -- Joe Hill, "20th Century Ghost"
"I didn't feel evil. I felt scared, nervous, nothing more." -- Scott Smith, A Simple Plan
"Some argued that the creation of artificial intelligence amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Consciousness was suffering. Why inflict it on a poor machine? I wasn't one of the people, but only because I believed that AI would someday make good on its promise of astonishing robot sex, if not for us, then for our children." -- Sam Lipsyte, The Ask [This book is a near 300 pages of great one-liners.]
I could easily write out this whole chapter, but I'll only post the first two paragraphs. The chapter was instrumental in Marlin's (The Naomi Pick-Up) development and has stuck with me.
"It was the perfect sarge.
When they walked into the VIP area of Miami's Crobar, everyone noticed. They were both platinum blondes with well-tanned fake breasts and identical outfits - tight white tank tops and tight white pants. How could anyone not notice? They were what the PUA's would call perfect 10's, and they were dressed to turn men into beasts. This was South Beach, where testosterone levels run high, and the pair had been whistled and hollered at all night. The girls seemed to enjoy the attention almost as much as they savored shooting down the men who gave it to them.
I knew what to do - and that was to do what everyone else wasn't doing. A pickup artist must be the exception to the rule. I had to suppress every evolutionary instinct inside me and pay them no attention whatsoever."
The Game - Neil Strauss
I haven't read The Game. So it's basically a self-help book for sociopathic predators?
No. It's not a self-help book.
"Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away."
~ Chuck Palahniuk (Consolation Prizes/Non Fiction)
"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting."
~ Amy Hempel (In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried)
"The oaks stirred restlessly, low admonitions, shhh..." Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper.
"Hard people makes hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away." Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
- James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Favorite line of this thread: So it's basically a self-help book for sociopathic predators?
Franny and Zooey is my favorite book and I think I like every sentence in it the best. Here is just one bit:
“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Avery, I've been petrified to read anything but Catcher, of Salinger's, because I have loved Catcher so deeply and so truely that I'm afraid it would somehow cheapen that love if I read his other work and didn't find it as perfect.
You've made me question this fear now, thanks to that quote. It captures much of my misanthropy in a few quick sentences. Now I have to decide if I should take the risk in reading it.
"Her skin was so black and supple that it looked like it would peel like a plum if plucked." (paraphrased) -some story I had to read in school. Now and then I still sit and puzzle out how that's supposed to work.
"The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it." Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
"I know your kneeler's knees must be itching, for want of some king to bend to." George R.R. Martin - A Storm of Swords
Sound, Cormac is a god. Before I found him, my sky only had light in the day, Hemingway was my sun. Now, my nights also have a McCarthy moon.
Have you jumped to any of the other big Southerners yet, Strange? Harry Crews is a good sideways from McCarthy. Him and Barry Hannah feel stitched into my soul now, each probably on polar ends of a McCarthy related Southerly writing spectrum.
I haven't, as I'm not familiar with those names, but if you vouch for them that's enough to pique my interest. Thanks for the suggestions.
I've also recently gained a deep appreciation of Ambrose Bierce. He isn't exactly Southern, per se, but I find his perspective and attitudes reminiscient of McCarthy. Granted, I haven't but scratched the surface of Bierce's body of work yet, so it's an evolving admiration.
"Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast."
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
@Avery: there's a line from that book that has stuck to me through the years as well:
Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.
Also a big fan of this line from Madam Bovary:
...human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
You want to listen to him read this. I promise.
"You wouldn't even wear what you're wearing. Trust me."
"It's you that is making yourself up, second by second, every second from now on..."
"What are you? How do you know? You don't know shit."
This is diamond-plated gold, Tony. This is some seriously serious shit I want to read now. I've read Man's Search for Meaning, so this is an intriguing book you've shown me. Thank you.
"The voluminous tweed trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion. Their pleats and nooks contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed Ignatius." -A Confederacy Of Dunces
“You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.”
-Kurt Vonnegut Timequake
"If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."
-David Foster Wallace The Pale King
"I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me."
-William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
There's too much, I could go on and on....
I'm glad you like it. I think everybody should read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men at LEAST twice.
If you do read it, let me know how you like it, please.
It's my favorite.
I hated Catcher in the Rye, but Franny and Zooey is one of my favorite books.
I don't have any quotes by quote-unquote famous authors, but I have these three lines pasted to sticky notes on my computer's desktop, as a reminder that a.) the reward of writing doesn't have to be money or publication, it can be writing itself, and b.) unpublished authors sometimes inspire me more than quote-unquote famous authors.
From Leash by Howie:
I put on my jacket. I hope she gets where she's headed. I hope she doesn't get what she wants. I close the door behind me, wishing I had a faded blue leash to leave for poor Carrie.
From Wired by Ryan:
Everyday I have to restitch the wounds in my heart, only to have them unravel somewhere in my dreams. My eyes are wet again.
From Hypothetically by Jim Woster, a strange and experimental story we're running in Issue Four of Parable:
The store owners in this city compare themselves to me and that's not right
I don't deserve to learn about their problems
Outside drinks
If I'm not ordering anything anyway what difference does it make what I bring in
And if you're wondering if I left it behind I did leave it behind And I'm not buying into this whole idea of that being an insult all right I don't deserve
"Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Downshore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.
He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach.
He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea."
Blood Meridian
--Cormac McCarthy
Sorry, Sound...
“It is impossible to picture to oneself the shame and moral degradation to which the jealous man can descend without a qualm of conscience. And yet it’s not as though the jealous were all vulgar and base souls. On the contrary, a man of lofty feelings, whose love is pure and full of self-sacrifice, may yet hide under tables, bribe the vilest people, and be familiar with the lowest ignominy of spying and eavesdropping.”
The Brothers Karamazov
--Fyodor Dostoevsky
"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
--James Joyce
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun into my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
-Palahniuk
Memorably strong first line. One of few that stick with me.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Paradise Lost, John Milton.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Neuromancer, William Gibson.
"This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. IN fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well.” - Lidia Yuknavitch
Broke me like a twig with that one she did and gutted me like a fish. I've been in love ever since.
Speaking of fish,
"My mother is a fish." from As I Lay Dying is possibly the best chapter ever.
@Drea: I'm rather partial to Chapter 16 of Christopher Moore's The Stupidist Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror:
So... so that sucked.
But I guess if you like literature, or whatever, you can go with Faulkner...
“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise
"I have a dog named Jackson, who between the ages of four and five, in people years, became suicidal. In a period of twelve months, Jackson jumped out the back of a speeding pickup truck, ate a fourteen-pound bag of nonorganic garden fertilizer, and threw himself between the jaws of a hundred-and-fifty-pound Russian wolfhound. Similarly, when I turned twenty-eight years old, I started to date a man whose favorite song was 'Desperado.' " -- Pam Houston, "Jackson Is Only One of My Dogs"