Great passages of prose

A couple of good ones i came across recently that moved me...

From Steven Erikson's The Devil Delivered:

What did I do wrong?
You were born, son, with the added misfortune of surviving it. You were new and helpless and you trusted, my how you trusted. You never learned the lessons of withholding that trust, of relying upon your judgments, of mastering healthy scepticism. Your gods took you in hand and led you into Hell. Regular folk, the kind that hosted parties, backyard barbecues, but to you they were gods, and like God Himself they laid a judgment upon you, that you should suffer, that you should know the anguish of a guilt you never earned. They gave you life, and you lived their definition of it.
Its a parable, in its own way. Analogous to the horror visited upon the sons and daughters by the fathers and mothers. They give you life: a world poisoned, its earth blasted and ripped open and breeding deadly diseases, its waters turgid and tossed with dead creatures, its air foul with invisible gases and holed like gauze letting the rays burn down the holy message of cancer and blindness.
We needed those cars, son, to speed up our pursuit of unachievable and unworthy dreams. We needed those forests stripped away, to plant food to feed our weeping multitudes. We needed that plastic that gave you tits and made you infertile. We needed those antibiotics, those televisions and their vital programming, those bloodless cameras that never blinked nor turned away. We needed all those wars to feed our technocratic utopia. We needed those prisonships, we needed segregation, calling in those bank loans, national lotteries, millionaire athletes, movie stars, white hoods and burning crosses, doctors gunned down outside abortion clinics, walled neighbourhoods with private armies, paedophiles, serial killers, terrorists, fundamentalists - we needed all those things, son, and you will, too. They're our gift to you, given out of love because we tried to better your lives. At least, that's what we kept telling each other. Can't you see how much better we've made your lives?


And from Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist:

The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV, and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel-chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a life-support mechanism and then hung upside-down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punching bag.

"He went. In a few moments, she blew the light out. The rain was falling steadily and the night was a black gulf. All was intensely still. Geoffrey listened everywhere: no sound save the rain. He stood between the stacks, but only heard the trickle of water, and the light swish of rain. Everything was lost in blackness. He imagined death was like that, many things dissolved in silence and darkness, blotted out, but existing. In the dense blackness he felt himself almost extinguished."

D H Lawrence

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Originally Posted by mayneverhave quoting James Joyce

Mr Bloom moved forward raising troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Time ball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of Sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pikehoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks!

Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballast office. She's right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound. She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking, Still I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit ? They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at storing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.

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Originally Posted by andave ya quoting James Joyce

Away! Away!
The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone -- come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

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Great selections from James Joyce!
While trying to read Finnegans Wake (the key word: 'try,' as it took me nearly a year and a companion), I memorized the last sentence continuing into the first sentence, which has a bit of a musical quality to it, whenever I recite it:

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Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the . . . riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

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Originally Posted by weltanschauung

you definetly should. its soooooooo good (if youre into the whole teletransport with existentialistic particles...)
the first proust i read was actually . . . two short stories: "the indifferent man", and "the end of jealousy", but they were like crack and i desperately searched for other things from him right away because i never thought it was so great.

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Thank you for the suggestion, weltanschauung, and for the effort of posting a picture. ;) I will have to take a look at it, next time I go to the bookstore (likely soon). :D

blindness - jose saramago \m/

Has everyone told their story about the last time they could see, asked the old man with the black eyepatch, Ill tell you mine, if theres no one else, said the unknown voice, If there is, he can speak after you, so fire away, The last thing I saw was a painting, A painting, repeated the old man with the black eyepatch, and where was this painting, I had gone to the museum, it was a picture of a cornfield with crows and cypress trees and a sun that gave the impression of having been made up of the fragments of other suns, Sounds like a Dutch painter, I think it was, but there was a drowning dog in it, already half submerged, poor creature, In that case it must be by a Spanish painter, before him no one had ever painted a dog in that situation, after him no other painter had the courage to try. Probably, and there was a cart laden with hay, drawn by horses and crossing a stream, Was there a house on the left, Yes, Then it was by an English painter, Could be, but I dont think so, because there was a woman as well with a child in her arms, Mothers and children are all too common in paintings, True, Ive noticed, What I dont understand is how in one painting there should be so many pictures and by such different painters, And there were some men eating, There have been so many lunches, afternoon snacks and suppers in the history of art, that this detail in itself is not enough to tell us who was eating, There were thirteen men altogether, Ah, then its easy, go on, There was also a naked woman with fair hair, inside a conch that was floating on the sea, and masses of flowers around her, Obviously Italian, And there was a battle, As in those paintings depicting banquets and mothers with children in their arms, these details are not enough to reveal who painted the picture, There were corpses and wounded men, Its only natural, sooner or later, all children die, and soldiers too, And a horse stricken with terror, With its eyes about to pop out of their sockets, Exactly, Horses are like that, and what other pictures were there in your painting, Alas, I never managed to find out, I went blind just as I was looking at the horse. Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here. Then the old man with the black eyepatch asked, How many blind persons are needed to make a blindness, No one could provide the answer.

Here is a very moving passage from Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night:

Next day at the churchyard his father was laid among a hundred Divers, Dorseys, and Hunters. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Flowers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.
'Good-bye, my father -- good-bye, all my fathers.'

I love the CS Lewis quote from the beginning.

What about the Bible? Now I'm not religious but I LOVE this:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

I love the CS Lewis quote from the beginning.

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It is beautiful isn't it. I am not at all religious, but I do admire Lewis' skill as a writer. He was extraordinarily intelligent as well (one of his colleagues at Oxford described him as "the best read man in England") and was able to read Literature in Ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and even obscure languages like medieval Welsh and Provencal. Here is Lewis again:

"If we cannot practice the 'presence of God', it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there...To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep."

Just as an interesting aside, did everyone know that C S Lewis was John Betjamen's tutor at Oxford? Betjamen hated him and blamed him for his eventual expulsion. I think Betjamen was a bit of an effeminate poseur as a student- he was certainly an aesthete (Evelyn Waugh got the idea of Sebastian's teddy from Betjamen).

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My rather extensive investigations into timetables make this exactly 8:44 A.M. Poseidon, in his fright, scared two mares into the narrow lane that was choked with approaching traffic. A truck driver had the courtesy to stop while Hazard tried to calm all his fine collection of horses; they responded by pulling the milkwagon crosswise on the road. The truck driver responded by yelling at Hazard, "Get the bloody milkwagon out of the way, you little peckerhead."

"You hangnail pecker yourself," Hazard replied, throwing ff his cape from his red sleeves and white gauntlets. In his joy at having acquired four excellent mares he became exuberantly reckless. "Get that roaring truck out of the bloody way and I'll get out of the way myself."

The driver, a moose of a man, turned off his engine. "Don't ekerpa me, you pandering redcoat peter," he shouted back at Hazard.

By this time an apreciative audience of pedestrians, most of them coeds on their way to the university, had begun to collect; little did they realize the trucker was offending the very core of Hazard's being.

"You tool," Hazard said. "You faltering apparatus."

"You whang and rod and pud," the truck driver replied.

The girls all together gave a little scream, some of the clapping.

Hazard saw his chance to drive away but missed it in order to shout, "You dong." He felt he was coming off rather badly in the exchange. "You drippy dong, you Johnny and Jock."

The trucker in his excitement was beginnung to stutter. "You diddly dink. you d - you d - you d - you dink. You dick." I might add that because of this exchange and the consequent delay it had occasioned, trucks were forever banned from using the High Level Bridge. "You dofunny copper," the druck driver added.

Now the group of girls, bright in their green and gold sweaters, jumping up and down, calpping, began to chant, "Shame. Shame."

"I'm no damn copper," Hazard shouted, more to the girls than to the trucker. "Dohicky to you."

"Hey," someone yelled from the cab of another truck. "Yo schmucks, both of you get out of the way."

"You schlongs," another trucker yelled.

"Shame," the girls chanted, leaning forward over the rail that kept them off the roadway. "Shame! Shame!"

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From The Studhorse Man by Robert Kroetsch.

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When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.

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From A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

"The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language." - James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity" - E.M.Forster - Howards End

"Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries." Beckett - Waiting for Godot

"As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window - Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!" and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear." - Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

I'll post some more later.

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Easy as it was to cut the wet, soft grass, it was hard work going up and down the steep slopes of the ravine. But the old man was not in the least troubled by it. Swinging his scythe just as usual, he climbed slowly up the steep slope, taking short, firm steps with his feet shod in large bast shoes, and though his whole body and his loosely hanging trousers below his long shirt shook, he did not miss a single blade of grass or a single mushroom, and went on cracking jokes with the peasants and Levin. Levin, who followed him, often thought that he would certainly fall as he climbed up the steep hillock with his scythe, for it would have normally been hard to reach the top even without a scythe. He felt as if some external force were setting him in motion.

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From Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

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While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear. But we have also an unconquerable faith in our own stars, and in the impossibility of anything venturing to go against us. As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other. In this way a balance is obtained.

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From 'The Deluge at Norderney' of Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

"Shrove Tuesday:

I gave Maurice Barres a spanking. We were three soldiers and one of us had a hole in the middle of his face. Maurice Barres came up to us and said, "That's fine!" and he gave each of us a small bouquet of violets. "I don't know where to put them," said the soldier with the hole in his head. Then Maurice Barres said, "Put them in the hole you have in your head." The soldier answered, "I'm going to stick them up your ***." And we turned over Maurice Barres and took his pants off. He had a cardinal's red robe on under his trousers. We lifted up the robe and Maurice Barres began to shout: "Look out! I've got on trousers with foot-straps." But we spanked him until he bled and then we took the petals of violets and drew the face of Deroulede on his backside." (sartre- la nausee)


"Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his *** to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. This *** talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventri-liquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called The Better Ole that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, "Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?" "Nah I had to go relieve myself." After a while the *** start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his *** would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the ******* would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the ******* said to him Its you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND ****. After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous - except for the EYES you dig. Thats one thing the ******* COULDN'T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnt give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffer-ing of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabs eyes on the end of a stalk." (w.burroughs -naked lunch)

"At lenght delay was no longer possible, and, with a heart almost bursting from my bosom, I advanced to the region of the forecastle, where my companions were awaiting me. I held ou my hand with the splinters, and Peters immedeately drew. He was free - his, at least, was not the shortest; and there was now another chance against my escape. I summoned up all my strength, and passed the lots to Augustus. He also drew immediately, and he also was free; and now, whether I should live or die, the chances were no more than precisely even. At this moment all the fierceness of the tiger possessed my bosom, and I felt toward my poor fellow-creature, Parker, the most intense, the most diabolical hatred. But the feeling did not last; and, at length, with a convulsive shudder and closed eyes, I held out the two remaining splinters toward him. It was full five minutes before he could summon resolution to draw, during which period of heart-rending suspense I never once opened my eyes. Presently one of the two lots was quickly drawn from my hand. The decision was then over, yet I knew no whether it was for me or against me. No one spoke, and still I dared not satisfy myself by looking at the splinter I held. Peters at length took me by the hand, and I forced myself to look up, when I immediately saw by the countenance of Parker that I was safe, and that he it was who had been doomed to suffer. Gasping for breath, I fell senseless to the deck.
I recovered from my swoon in time to behold the consummation of the tragedy in the death of him who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing it about. He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeeth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month. (...)

(...)August Ist.- A continuance of the same calm weather, with an oppressively hot sun. Suffered exceedingly from thirst, the water in the jug being absolutely putrid and swarming with vermin. We contrived, nevertheless, to swallow a portion of it by mixing it with wine: our thirst, however, was but little abated. We found more relief by bathing in the sea, but could not avail ourselves of this expedient except at long intervals, on account of the continual presence of sharks. We now saw clearly that Augustus could not be saved, - that he was evidently dying. We could do nothing to relieve his sufferings, which appeared to be great. About twelve o'clock he expired in strong convulsions, and without having spoken for several hours. His death filled us with the most floomy forebodings, and had so great an effect upon our spirits that we sat motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never addressed each other except in a whisper. It was not until some time after dark that we took courage to get up and throw the body overboard. It was then loathsome beyond expression, and so far decayed that, as Peters attempted to lift it, and entire leg came off in his grasp. As the mass of putrefaction slipped over the vessel's side into the water, the glare of phosphoric light with whith it was surrounded plainly discovered to us seven or eight large sharks, the clashing of whose horrible teeth, as their prey was torn to pieces among them, might have been heard at the distance of a mile. We shrunk within ourseves in the extremity of horror at the sound." (poe, the narratives of arthur gordon pym)

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Originally Posted by mono

From Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

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I love that whole chapter where Levin is cutting with the peasants. It's so vivid!

"There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kind-hearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one's own--to be, in fact, "just like everyone else." To have wealth, but not that of Rothschild's; to be from an honoured family but that has never distinguished itself for anything relevant; to be goodlooking but with it, not expressing anything in particular; to have intelligence, but no original ideas; to have a good heart, but no soul grandiosity; to have good education, but not even know what to do with it etc etc..

For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person's nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine--. I think such an individual really does become a type of his own--a type of commonplaceness which will not for the world, if it can help it, be contented, but strains and yearns to be something original and independent, without the slightest possibility of being so.

Of such people there are countless numbers in this world--far more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can--that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but felt some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they. Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain. The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed to a wonderful extent in such cases;--unlikely as it appears, it is met with at every turn." (dostoievski, the idiot)