Best Sentences / Lines In Literature Thread?

Cosmo

Hi y'all, hope that everyone is well! It's been a hot minute but I am still alive and kicking

Anyway, I was reading this piece on NPR this morning about the Ten Best Sentences In Literature (below) and I was reminded of a similar thread from back in the day where people posted up their favorite sentences or passages from literature. I think Gareth was the creator of the thread (Kitchen Knight??) and other than that I have no idea how to search for it... But it was a great thread and definitely bump-worthy if anyone can find it.

Okey dokey!!


http://www.npr.org/2014/03/26/294823375/it-was-the-best-of-sentences

Cosmo

Also wow...

"Down Since Nov 04, 2003"

I've been on The Strut for over a decade now!

Reynaldo

http://www.soulstrut.com/index.php?/forums/viewthread/59103/

DB_Cooper

ÔÇ£So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.ÔÇØ - The Great Gatsby

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." - Macbeth

"I looked and beheld a pale horse, and the name of the rider of that horse was Death, and all hell came with him." - Revelations

Reynaldo

Diddy's rant on Rick Ross' "Nobody."

LazarusOblong

He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.

DJ_Enki

Reynaldo said:

Diddy's rant on Rick Ross' "Nobody."

If we're talking rants in songs, than Oran "Juice" Jones' rant at the end of "The Rain."


But on the real:

"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
--The Stranger

james

Upon review, most of what my brain has filed as "great lines" are actually, when confronted on the page, multiple sentences long. Either that, or they don't really say anything when removed from their context. Good, honest-to-goodness stand-alone single lines are, I guess, scarcer than I've remembered.

But anyway, off the head:

- ÔÇ£For every family, every group, there is a myth of continued collective ascent that at some point stops being plausible.ÔÇØ -- Geoffrey OÔÇÖBrien, Sonata For Jukebox

- ÔÇ£It sounded funny at first, but I got used to it very fast, and then I liked it more than anything IÔÇÖd ever heard.ÔÇØ -- Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Lizard Music

- ÔÇ£Who know but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?ÔÇØ -- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

- ÔÇ£The beats of her heart lessened one by one, vaguer each time and softer, as a fountain sinks, an echo disappears; and when she sighed her last breath she thought she saw an opening in the heavens, and a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.ÔÇØ -- Gustave Flaubert, ÔÇ£A Simple HeartÔÇØ

- ÔÇ£And I told him all that and then I knew I couldnÔÇÖt tell him the rest and that I couldnÔÇÖt marry a man I couldnÔÇÖt tell this story to.ÔÇØ -- Amy Bloom, ÔÇ£Love Is Not A PieÔÇØ

- ÔÇ£A spadeful of diamonds for whoever brings me back the dog that I once was!ÔÇØ

b/w

- ÔÇ£Inside this hat there is a portrait of me with my feet in the air (it is a hatÔÇÖs eye view).ÔÇØ -- Paul Eluard, The Immaculate Conception

Duderonomy

There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the cross-wise interblending of other threads with it's own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

vintageinfants

"The worldÔÇÖs showing signs of waking up from its linear trance, its dangerously restrictive sense of itself as a historic vehicle chuffing down a one-way street toward some preordained apocalyptic goal."

"From the peeling wastes east of Al-Zarqa, there cam a faint but persistant cry, a cray to dam the flood tides of semen, to leash the sperm packs running wild in the sheets, to zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt, to garrote the gullible glorification of gamete, forsake the foolish fidelity to fecundity, and wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa that the Church had draped there like a weighty shawl and that pulled her ever downward into sickness and servitude, while at her skirts her too-many children went hungry, went bad, or just went."

"ÔÇ£And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman's rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.ÔÇØ

"ÔÇ£To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.ÔÇØ

-Tom Robbins

DOR

This line made an impact on me as a kid in school.

ÔÇ£Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.ÔÇØ - Farley Mowat

LaserWolf

Yes. I half heard that story this on NPR this morning. I kept waiting for them to mention Raymond Chandler and Dashell Hammett. When they didn't I figured they didn't know what they were talking about.

This is the Tom Robbins sentence I remember 35 years later: "October lies on the Skagit like a wet rag on a salad."

LazarusOblong

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

That line hit me where I lived the first time I read it. I wish KV had stuck around a little longer.

kitchenknight

Shit, I did start that thread! All to post this paragraph from the end of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. Still kills:

"He lifted a hand and turned and went on. He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. Walking down the little street for the last time he felt everything fall away from him. Until there was nothing left for him to shed. It was all gone. No trail, no track. The spoor petered out down there on Front Street where things he'd been lay like paper shadows, a few here, they thin out. After that nothing. A few rumors. Idle word on the wind. Old news years in traveling that you could not put stock in."

Damn.

Others... From Moby Dick:

Consider all this; and then turn to this green gentle and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

This description of being fucked up from Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson has always stuck with me, and comes back in a hungover moment.

ÔÇ£The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.ÔÇØ

It's big, but there are passages of Infinite Jest that just floor me, including these two (both Don Gately related... The latter is the end of the book):

...the ADA was coldly biding his time, being a patient Get-Even and Cold-Dish man just like Don Gately, who was, through no will to energy-consuming violence on his part, in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man's life right around.

...

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

The last paragraph of "I Married a Communist," by Philip Roth is too long to type, but is just mind blowingly gorgeous, so I'll just leave you with the last line... The stars are indispensable.

twoply

james said:

- ÔÇ£It sounded funny at first, but I got used to it very fast, and then I liked it more than anything IÔÇÖd ever heard.ÔÇØ -- Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Lizard Music

I don't have the book anymore, but there's a great Pinkwater line in Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights where he describes his revelation that all of the bumming around, daydreaming, and just taking the world in that people criticized him for was in actuality just a form of gestation. That felt nice to read.

JATX

Let's sway from the literary stuff for a minute:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." George V. Higgin-"The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

I've always loved that opening line. So simple and to-the-point, yet right away it tells you exactly what you're getting into.

Gary

I don't read much fiction. Mostly science books these days. I underline anything that I think is interesting. There is a book called "the beginning of infinity" by david Deutsch that is incredible. It's a real mind bender. But in there was this line that makes me laugh:

"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."

Out of context maybe it's not that funny. That book is highly recommended for smart people.

yuichi

It's only in my early 30s now, that I've come to fully appreciate John Steinbeck....slightly cynical but on point.....

"Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes not so much to see as to tell afterwards." from Travels with Charley.

kitchenknight

JATX said:

Let's sway from the literary stuff for a minute:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." George V. Higgin-"The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

I've always loved that opening line. So simple and to-the-point, yet right away it tells you exactly what you're getting into.

That book is phenomenal, and so well written. Shit, that book is literature, no high/low about it.

p_gunn

ÔÇ£The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, letÔÇÖs not try to be witty, but on the other hand, letÔÇÖs not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness weÔÇÖve seen without changing one word. When thatÔÇÖs done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. ThatÔÇÖs work enough for a lifetime. ÔÇØ

Celine, Journey To The End Of The Night

LazarusOblong

gareth said:

JATX said:

Let's sway from the literary stuff for a minute:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." George V. Higgin-"The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

I've always loved that opening line. So simple and to-the-point, yet right away it tells you exactly what you're getting into.

That book is phenomenal, and so well written. Shit, that book is literature, no high/low about it.

Absolutely. I've got an Ivy English degree and crime fiction is all over my shelves.

JATX

LazarusOblong said:

gareth said:

JATX said:

Let's sway from the literary stuff for a minute:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." George V. Higgin-"The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

I've always loved that opening line. So simple and to-the-point, yet right away it tells you exactly what you're getting into.

That book is phenomenal, and so well written. Shit, that book is literature, no high/low about it.

Absolutely. I've got an Ivy English degree and crime fiction is all over my shelves.

I too am a lit major. Good to know I'm not alone in my tastes. Assuming you read Elmore Leonard, can you recommend anybody who writes characterizations that come close to his? (I know he's the king,but maybe a runner-up or two I've yet to discover.)

Electrode

"Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."
- Bertolt Brecht's 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui'

OK, it's from one of his plays and the finale to Peckinpah's WW2 flick from '77, "Iron Cross", brought me there, but I read it from a book.

LaserWolf

Electrode said:

"For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."
- Bertolt Brecht's 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui'

Damn that's good.
I wonder if he wrote it in German or English.

Frank

ÔÇ£I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.ÔÇØ

Cormac MacCarthy
All the Pretty Horses



ÔÇ£Look, girls don't care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car.ÔÇØ

Donald Ray Pollock
Knockemstiff



MacCarthy's Border Trilogy (together with Blood Meridian) and Pollock's the Devil All the Time (even better than Knockemstiff but they're both two parts of the same book anyways) were the best books I got to read in recent memory.

LazarusOblong

JATX said:

LazarusOblong said:

gareth said:

JATX said:

Let's sway from the literary stuff for a minute:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." George V. Higgin-"The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

I've always loved that opening line. So simple and to-the-point, yet right away it tells you exactly what you're getting into.

That book is phenomenal, and so well written. Shit, that book is literature, no high/low about it.

Absolutely. I've got an Ivy English degree and crime fiction is all over my shelves.

I too am a lit major. Good to know I'm not alone in my tastes. Assuming you read Elmore Leonard, can you recommend anybody who writes characterizations that come close to his? (I know he's the king,but maybe a runner-up or two I've yet to discover.)

Give Ken Bruen and Charles Willeford a shot. And absolutely Derek Raymond's "Factory" series.

JATX

Thanks for the recommendations. I look forward to checking them out.

Grandfather

"That book is highly recommended for smart people." - Gary

Already my favorite.

Frank

LazarusOblong said:

Give Ken Bruen and Charles Willeford a shot. And absolutely Derek Raymond's "Factory" series.

I'm a huge fan of Charles Willeford and Derek Raymond so I just went ahead and ordered two Ken Bruen novels...

LoopDreams

"And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;"

T. S. Eliot