Brilliant passages of writing

[Sam]

Not sure if this has been done before...

Inspired by the wonderful passage from Moby Dick in the books thread, I thought it would be nice to celebrate great bits of writing which can be enjoyed and admired in themselves.

Aphorisms, epigramms, reviews, journalism, speeches etc. Anything where you can delight in the sumptuousness and virtuosity of the writing.

Hopefully, it will be different from the books thread, as it's more about the individual bits of writing than the books themselves.

I'll kick things off from one of my favourite books of all time, "The Book of Disquiet".

After I've slept many dreams, I go out to the street with eyes wide open but still with the aura and assurance of my dreams. And I'm astonished by my automatism, which prevents others from really knowing me. For I go through daily life still holding the hand of my astral nursemaid; my steps are in perfect accord with the obscure designs of my sleeping mind. And I walk in the right direction; I don't stagger; I react well; I exist.

But in the respites when I don't have to watch where I'm going to avoid vehicles or oncoming pedestrians, when I don't have to speak to anyone or enter a door up ahead, then I launch once more like a paper boat on to the waters of sleep, and once more I return to the fading illusion that cuddles my hazy conciousness of the morning now emerging amid the sounds of the vegetable carts.

And it is then, in the middle of life's bustle, that my dream becomes a marvellous film. I walk along an unreal downtown street, and the reality of its non-existent lives affectionately wraps my head in a white cloth of false memories. I'm a navigator engaged in unknowing myself. I've overcome everything where I've never been. And this somnolence that allows me to walk, bent forward in a march over the impossible, feels like a breeze.

Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it's  time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it's not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I'm no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretely constellate and have my infinity.

It's absolutely chock full of the this sort of thing and you need it in your life.

Over to you.

[daf]

One of my favourite PG Wodehouse passages is Bertie talking to Roderick Spode from 'The Code of The Woosters' (1938) :

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene
by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags!
Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

[Queneau]

I've said a lot about this passage from Beckett's Watt but it really is one of my favourite pieces of prose. I think I once typed up the whole bit to post here but I'm currently posting on my phone so it isn't practical.

It starts here:

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

[Queneau]

That was a premature post. It goes on, and on. And on.

This should be a link to Jack Emery reading it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1FBSRqxlfE

Hopefully he takes it as far as, 'An excrement.'

[eluc55]

Watching the brilliant Richard II on BBC last week, I was reminded what a great passage this is, even by Shakespeare's standards:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/p00s90j1/?t=30m52s

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out,--I die pronouncing it,--
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Cormac!

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he.   He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing.  The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

And then there's this - Attacked By Comanches:

Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quenas, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedlight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and he was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstreched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down on the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

[Eis Nein]

Cool for cats.

[madhair60]

Would it be poor form to post something from Achewood?

[Retinend]

Motherfucking Under Milk Wood:

SECOND VOICE
Conceived in Milk Wood, born in a barn, wrapped in paper, left on a doorstep, big-headed and bass-voiced she grew in the dark until long-dead Gomer Owen kissed her when she wasn't looking because he was dared. Now in the light she'll work, sing, milk, say the cows' sweet names and sleep until the night sucks out her soul and spits it into the sky. In her life-long love light, holily Bessie milks the fond lake-eyed cows as dusk showers slowly down over byre, sea and town. [p. 76]

MR PUGH
Pigs can't read, my dear.

MRS PUGH
I know one who can.

FIRST VOICE [narrator]
Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel.

MR PUGH
You know best, dear
[p. 63]
--



MRS PUGH
You should wait until you retire to your sty,

SECOND VOICE
says Mrs Pugh, sweet as a razor. His fawning measly quarter-smile freezes. Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist's den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrens and phials brimful with pox and the black death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker wife.

MR PUGH
I beg your pardon, my dear,

SECOND VOICE
he murmurs with a weedle
[p. 68]

[Retinend]

I've said a lot about this passage from Beckett's Watt but it really is one of my favourite pieces of prose. I think I once typed up the whole bit to post here but I'm currently posting on my phone so it isn't practical.

It starts here:

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

Sublime. Here's a nice bit from Worstward Ho, which like yours benefits from reading orally:

Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Long vain longing. And longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly longing still. For fainter still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing for the least of longing. Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable vain least of longing still.

I think the motifs become like a little solar system of tongue twisters. You could also read it as a series of re-written starts, sort of like the character in The Plague who cannot write the first sentence of his book.

[Retinend]

I'll kick things off from one of my favourite books of all time, "The Book of Disquiet".

Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it's  time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it's not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I'm no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretely constellate and have my infinity.

I don't like this. He's "drunk from feeling," how nice for him. Alcohol is indeed a bit like being extremely happy. Then when he's supposedly drunk he "walks straight ahead," clashing and clunkily stumbling into three poor attempts at vaguely describing stoned thoughts of oneness with the universe:

I. staring at a river and understanding like, everything, II. We're like, all the same, III. The sky! It's goes on, literally, forever.

And finally he "secretley" constellates, which makes you think of a little girl cuddling herself and making her dimples show, which is a really pussy way of experiencing profound revelation of the least worked-for kind. What triggered this revelation? I'm willing to bet if he told it to any one of Hemingway's characters they'd kick his candy ass.

[chris87]

Glad you liked the passage Sam. Another of my favourites from the prelude to Middlemarch:

"Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand- in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

   That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept
into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

   Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed."

Also, As Kingfishers catch fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I posted before years ago:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

[chris87]

Cormac!

And then there's this - Attacked By Comanches:

To add (for context, this is a dream sequence and the judge is a quasi supernatural corrupter of men*):
"In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end."

*As far as I remember anyway, ages since I read blood meridian.

[Smeraldina Rima]

It goes on, and on. And on.

This should be a link to Jack Emery reading it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1FBSRqxlfE

Hopefully he takes it as far as, 'An excrement.'

Jack Emery's unhappiness there made me think of Jerry Sadowitz who would make a great Lucky with the similar speech in Waiting for Godot if the Chuckle brothers were Vladimir and Estragon. The reading continues as far as you hoped it would, but it would be a shame to end after 'an excrement' (if you hadn't already been the king of rock and roll) so I'm happy he carries on through the pastoral cycle and takes it as far as 'a turd' and still he keeps going.

The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oillamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February débâcle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again. A turd. And if I could begin it all over again, knowing what I know now, the result would be the same. And if I could begin again a third time, knowing what I would know then, the result would be the same. And if I could begin it all over again a hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the time before, the result would always be the same, and the hundredth life as the first, and the hundred lives as one. A cat's flux. But at this rate we shall be here all night.

It's one of my favourite passages in Beckett too. The resentment has a confusing way of also being accidental praise of the landscape. I love that the invective for the seasons includes the february débâcle every fourth year and a world class character, 'the consumptive postman whistling The Roses are Blooming in Picardy'. These complaints are funny to me.

This is a disgusting personal favourite, from George Bataille's Story of the Eye. It opened a lot of doors for me. Mainly wardrobe doors on wardobes with piss in them. Does anyone know if Blue of Noon or any other Bataille novel is as good? I love this book and particularly this sexy passage.

Simone, standing with her dress tucked up, was rubbing her bare cunt against the wardrobe, in which a girl was audibly masturbating with brutal gasps. And all at once, something incredible happened, a strange swish of water, followed by a trickle and a stream from under the wardrobe door: poor Marcelle was pissing in her wardrobe while masturbating. But the explosion of totally drunken guffaws that ensued rapidly degenerated into a debauche of tumbling bodies, lofty legs and arses, wet skirts and come. Guffaws emerged like foolish and involuntary hiccoughs but scarcely managed to interrupt a brutal onslaught on cunts and cocks. And yet soon we could hear Marcelle dismally sobbing alone, louder and louder, in the make-shift pissoir that was now her prison.

I found this picture of Retinend offering alcohol to a reluctant Fernando Pessoa.

"I prefer to get high on life."

[jutl]

Alright I'll post it again...

[sick as a pike]

That's as may be Mr Cioran, but I still don't think it's unreasonable to expect the tumble dryer you sold me to last more than six months.

[Famous Mortimer]

"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

Almost the entirety of this book is quotable, just magnificently written.

[Doomy Dwyer]

This is nice, Sam. Some beauties here . 'The Blood Meridian', nice choice CG. Dripping with - ahem- passages of grotesque beauty. And Retinend, getting in early with a bit of 'Milkwood', you rascal. That's long been a favourite of mine. Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton - now there's a fine thing.

This is from 'The Dead' by my boy Jimmy Joyce. You could probably quote any passage at random, but I'm going with a portion of the climax, if you'll allow me such an indulgence. It's a very famous, much parodied piece of writing, but, having just read it for the purposes of this thread after a number of years, I can safely say it still rocks the fucking house. It's poetic, it's true and it's beautiful. I can only imagine that after writing this, James Joyce treated himself to the most ecstatic and tumultuous wank in literary history. I'll bet his furniture was in ruins. To give a bit of context, its our hero Gabriel Conroy experiencing a moment of epiphany. He's realising he hardly knows his wife, of her first love for the, now dead, Michael Furey, and the passion they shared. It's him looking at himself and coming up short. It's shit or get off the pot time for Gabriel Conroy - but which way will he jump? We'll never know, 'cause its the end of the tale. But anyone who's ever felt trapped - and that should be just about everyone - can imagine what GC's feeling at this point. And we should, by this point, be crying.

It's also about the poxy weather in Ireland. Gabriel looks out of the window as the snow falls -

"It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Fuck me.

There's a line from the 'Great Gatsby' that's always stayed with me -

"Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

Another good days work there. Straight down the boozer for Scotty. "What foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams..." I'll have that. If you never wrote another line, that'd be enough. Strangely enough, I've never been able to read anything else by F Scott Fitgerald. Which is my problem and not his.

I'm trying to find a line from 'A Meaningful Life' by LJ Davis, but I'm not going to find it. It concerns the main protagonists boring father-in-law and how he sits as if he's been arranged by a particularly unimaginative nurse. It's very funny, despite me mangling it up there. Great book. very dark, very wrong in places. But very funny.

[Neville Chamberlain]

"When I was eight years old, I suffered a nose bleed so profuse and generous, I bolted from the schoolyard and sought solace in the first-class countryside of Norfolk."

Just beautiful.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Gervaise's wedding from Emile Zola's L'Assommoir, when the poor Parisiennes go to visit the Louvre, is one of the saddest things I've ever read:

Something must be done, however, to get rid of the time until dinner. Bibi-la-Grillade proposed cards; Mme Lerat suggested storytelling. To each proposition a thousand objections were offered. Finally when Lorilleux proposed that the party should visit the tomb of Abelard and Heloise his wife's indignation burst forth.

She had dressed in her best only to be drenched in the rain and to spend the day in a wineshop, it seemed! She had had enough of the whole thing and she would go home. Coupeau and Lorilleux held the door, she exclaiming violently:

"Let me go; I tell you I will go!"

Her husband having induced her to listen to reason, Coupeau went to Gervaise, who was calmly conversing with her mother-in-law and Mme Fauconnier.

"Have you nothing to propose?" he asked, not venturing to add any term of endearment.

"No," she said with a smile, "but I am ready to do anything you wish. I am very well suited as I am."

Her face was indeed as sunny as a morning in May. She spoke to everyone kindly and sympathetically. During the storm she had sat with her eyes riveted on the clouds, as if by the light of those lurid flashes she was reading the solemn book of the future.

M. Madinier had proposed nothing; he stood leaning against the counter with a pompous air; he spat upon the ground, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and rolled his eyes about.

"We could go to the Musee du Louvre, I suppose," and he smoothed his chin while awaiting the effect of this proposition.

"There are antiquities there–statues, pictures, lots of things. It is very instructive. Have any of you been there?" he asked.

They all looked at each other. Gervaise had never even heard of the place, nor had Mme Fauconnier nor Boche. Coupeau thought he had been there one Sunday, but he was not sure, but Mme Lorilleux, on whom Madinier's air of importance had produced a profound impression, approved of the idea. The day was wasted anyway; therefore, if a little instruction could be got it would be well to try it. As the rain was still falling, they borrowed old umbrellas of every imaginable hue from the establishment and started forth for the Musee du Louvre.

There were twelve of them, and they walked in couples, Mme Lorilleux with Madinier, to whom she grumbled all the way.

"We know nothing about her," she said, "not even where he picked her up. My husband has already lent them ten francs, and whoever heard of a bride without a single relation? She said she had a sister in Paris. Where is she today, I should like to know!"

She checked herself and pointed to Gervaise, whose lameness was very perceptible as she descended the hill.

"Just look at her!" she muttered. "Wooden legs!"

This epithet was heard by Mme Fauconnier, who took up the cudgels for Gervaise who, she said, was as neat as a pin and worked like a tiger.

The wedding party, coming out of La Rue St-Denis, crossed the boulevard under their umbrellas amid the pouring rain, driving here and there among the carriages. The drivers, as they pulled up their horses, shouted to them to look out, with an oath. On the gray and muddy sidewalk the procession was very conspicuous–the blue dress of the bride, the canary-colored breeches of one of the men, Madinier's square-tailed coat–all gave a carnivallike air to the group. But it was the hats of the party that were the most amusing, for they were of all heights, sizes and styles. The shopkeepers on the boulevard crowded to their windows to enjoy the drollery of the sight. The wedding procession, quite undisturbed by the observation it excited, went gaily on. They stopped for a moment on the Place des Victoire–the bride's shoestring was untied–she fastened it at the foot of the statue of Louis XIV, her friends waiting as she did so.

Finally they reached the Louvre. Here Madinier politely asked permission to take the head of the party; the place was so large, he said, that it was a very easy thing to lose oneself; he knew the prettiest rooms and the things best worth seeing, because he had often been there with an artist, a very intelligent fellow, from whom a great manufacturer of pasteboard boxes bought pictures.

The party entered the museum of Assyrian antiquities. They shivered and walked about, examining the colossal statues, the gods in black marble, strange beasts and monstrosities, half cats and half women. This was not amusing, and an inscription in Phoenician characters appalled them. Who on earth had ever read such stuff as that? It was meaningless nonsense!

But Madinier shouted to them from the stairs, "Come on! That is nothing! Much more interesting things up here, I assure you!"

The severe nudity of the great staircase cast a gloom over their spirits; an usher in livery added to their awe, and it was with great respect and on the tips of their toes they entered the French gallery.
How many statues! How many pictures! They wished they had all the money they had cost.
In the Gallerie d'Apollon the floor excited their admiration; it was smooth as glass; even the feet of the sofas were reflected in it. Madinier bade them look at the ceiling and at its many beauties of decoration, but they said they dared not look up. Then before entering the Salon Carre he pointed to the window and said:

"That is the balcony where Charles IX fired on the people!"

With a magnificent gesture he ordered his party to stand still in the center of the Salon Carre.
"There are only chefs-d'oeuvres here," he whispered as solemnly as if he had been in a church.
They walked around the salon. Gervaise asked the meaning of one of the pictures, the _Noces de Cana_; Coupeau stopped before _La Joconde_, declaring that it was like one of his aunts.
Boche and Bibi-la-Grillade snickered and pushed each other at the sight of the nude female figures, and the Gaudrons, husband and wife, stood open-mouthed and deeply touched before Murillo's Virgin.
When they had been once around the room Madinier, who was quite attentive to Mme Lorilleux on account of her silk gown, proposed they should do it over again; it was well worth it, he said.
He never hesitated in replying to any question which she addressed to him in her thirst for information, and when she stopped before Titian's Mistress, whose yellow hair struck her as like her own, he told her it was a mistress of Henri IV, who was the heroine of a play then running at the Ambigu.
The wedding party finally entered the long gallery devoted to the Italian and Flemish schools of art. The pictures were all meaningless to them, and their heads were beginning to ache. They felt a thrill of interest, however, in the copyists with their easels, who painted without being disturbed by spectators. The artists scattered through the rooms had heard that a primitive wedding party was making a tour of the Louvre and hurried with laughing faces to enjoy the scene, while the weary bride and bridegroom, accompanied by their friends, clumsily moved about over the shining, resounding floors much like cattle let loose and with quite as keen an appreciation of the marvelous beauties about them.

The women vowed their backs were broken standing so long, and Madinier, declaring he knew the way, said they would leave after he had shown them a certain room to which he could go with his eyes shut. But he was very much mistaken. Salon succeeded to salon, and finally the party went up a flight of stairs and found themselves among cannons and other instruments of war. Madinier, unwilling to confess that he had lost himself, wandered distractedly about, declaring that the doors had been changed. The party began to feel that they were there for life, when suddenly to their great joy they heard the cry of the janitors resounding from room to room.

"Time to close the doors!"

They meekly followed one of them, and when they were outside they uttered a sigh of relief as they put up their umbrellas once more, but one and all affected great pleasure at having been to the Louvre.

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

The end of 'Heretics' by G K Chesterton is a masterful fusion of logic and poetry that is quite possibly unrivaled in the english language.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

[Queneau]

Jack Emery's unhappiness there made me think of Jerry Sadowitz who would make a great Lucky with the similar speech in Waiting for Godot if the Chuckle brothers were Vladimir and Estragon.

I am struggling to think of anything I want to happen more than that.[nb]This includes world peace and getting a toaster that actually fucking works.[/nb]

[garbed_attic]

Would it be poor form to post something from Achewood?

Stone cold, there is never shame in following that path.

And from W.N.P. Barbellion, when he was still a lad, really...

"To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my 'Soul,' my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me — but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you."

[Sam]

I don't like this....three poor attempts at vaguely describing stoned thoughts of oneness with the universe:

Ho ho. But imagining you were serious, I'll use that as an excuse to post another belter, and let the fictional author from the book within a book reply to you:

Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I've written, and I find it's all worthless and should have been left unwritten. The things we achieve, whether empires or sentences, have (because they've been achieved) the worst aspect of real things: the fact they're perishable. But that's not what worries or grieves me about these pages as I reread them now, in these idle moments. What grieves me is that it wasn't worth my trouble to write them, and the time I spent doing it earned me nothing but the illusion, now shattered, that it was worth doing.

Whatever we pursue, we pursue for the sake of ambition, but either we never realize the ambition, and we're poor, or we think we've realized it, and we're rich fools.

What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done it better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing. It belies the notion of inner as well as of outer perfection; it falls short not only of the standard it shoud meet but also of the standard we thought it could meet. We're hollow on the inside as well as on the outside, pariahs in our expectations and in our realizations.

With what power of the solitary human soul I produced page after reclusive page, living syllable by syllable the false magic, not of what I wrote, but of what I thought I was writing! As if under an ironic sorcer's spell, I imagined myself the poet of my own prose, in the winged moments when it welled up in me - swifter than the strokes of my pen -  like an illusory revenge against the insults of life! And today, rereading, I see my dolls bursting, the straw coming out of their seams, eviscerated without ever having been...

Happy now? :)

Alright I'll post it again...

Ah, very sweet of you, but due to a grievous typo on my part, I rendered the whole thing pooey and meaningless. The ending should of course be 'wallow in my mortality not immortality.

Ciroan is too good for this thread; if anything he needs his own. The above passage is fun, but not even close to his best writing. "The Trouble With Being Born" trounces even the best writer's best efforts. The prose is cuarterized with sarcasm and irony, then deep frozen into little snowflakes, tossed loosely to the page...If Basho, Chamfort, Mallarme, Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche and Beckett were locked in a room...

I am amazed that Pesso and Ciroan were writing the same sort of stuff at the same time, without presumingly knowing anything of the other. There are passages in their writing which are freakily similar, not just the tone, but the actual insights and conclusions.

In my first post, the fictional author awakes from dreams to find he is an automaton; for Ciroan, the insomnia is the starting point:

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a spectre, how would you see others as alive?

Interestingly Ciroan hung out with Beckett in Paris, but the latter found the former too bleak and depressing. Ha!

And while we're talking of Sammy, I like this little beaut from The End:

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

And I leave you with this, from John Updike:

"Last night's dreams. I am skiing on a white slope, beneath a white sky. I look down at my feet and they are also white, and my skis are engulfed by the powder. I am exhilarated. Then the dream transfers me to another interior, a ski hut where the white walls merge into the doomed ceiling indistinguishably. There is an Eskimo maiden, muscular, brown, naked. I am dressed like a doctor, but more stiffly, in large white cards. I awaken, immensley ashamed.

"In the negative print of this dream I am sitting on a white bowl and my excrement overflows, unstoppably, unwipably, engulfing my feet, my thighs in patches and I try to escape. I awaken and am relieved to be in bed, between clean sheets. Then I look at my arms in the half-light of dawn and an ineluctable horror sweeps over me. This is real. This is skin is me, I can't get out".

[CaledonianGonzo]

Meanwhile, Mr. Pickwick and his friends having walked their blood into active circulation, proceeded cheerfully on. The paths were hard; the grass was crisp and frosty; the air had a fine, dry, bracing coldness; and the rapid approach of the gray twilight (slate-coloured is a better term in frosty weather) made them look forward with pleasant anticipation to the comforts which awaited them at their hospitable entertainer's. It was the sort of afternoon that might induce a couple of elderly gentlemen, in a lonely field, to take off their greatcoats and play at leap-frog in pure lightness of heart and gaiety

I just love the whole chapter:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/580/580-h/580-h.htm#2HCH0028

[gabrielconroy]

Heaney: Digging


Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.





And read by the man himself: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzJgbNANzk

[Sam]

Heaney is the poor man's Derek Mahon. I'll type up the latter's Eulogy to MacNeice 'Carrowdore' when I have time. On hearing this, Heaney screwed up his own attempt and threw it on the floor. Sometimes writing is a competition :)

Incidentally, are people typing these up manually or copy and pasting from e-books or the web? Ideally the passages shouldn't be too long. Getting the tl;dr feeling defeats the purpose of the thread somewhat.

Anyway cheers for all the contributions so far, it should lead to new recommendations for all..

[Retinend]

Happy now? :)

No... you just posted some more dreary navel-gazing ;) If you want to read something with imagination, rather than sheer self-importance, read E. L. Doctorow:

I was holding the rail and pressing my back against the side of the cabin and beginning to feel the light head that comes with the realization that water is a beast of another planet, and with each passing moment it was drawing in my imagination a portrait of its mysterious powerful and endlessly vast animacy right there under the boat I was riding, and all the other boats of the world as well, which if they lashed themselves together wouldn't cover an inch of its undulant and heaving hide.

(...)

Irving rose from his kneeling position and offered his arm, and Bo Weinberg took it, like some princess at a ball, and delicately, gingerly, placed one foot at a time in the laundry tub in front of him that was filled with wet cement. I had of course seen from the moment that I had come through the door how the tubbed cement made a slow-witted diagram of the sea outside, the slab of it shifting to and fro as the boat rose and fell on the waves.

[Retinend]

Incidentally, are people typing these up manually or copy and pasting from e-books or the web? Ideally the passages shouldn't be too long. Getting the tl;dr feeling defeats the purpose of the thread somewhat.

Tough guy stuff aside, I agree that some of these are too long. I like the idea of this thread but you appreciate the small details of BPoW more when there is a single image or linked set of thoughts being described.

And I'm getting my quotes from old reviews I've written on goodreads.com.

[Lee Van Cleef]

In the book by Irvin Yalom that I'm (still) reading, he wrote a story about a patient whom, it seems, had multiple personality disorder... the last few paragraphs took my breath away.

Before we began therapy, I had informed Marge that we could meet for a maximum of eighteen months because of my sabbatical plans. Now the time was up, our work at an end.  Marge had changed: the panics occurred only rarely; the midnight phone calls were a thing of the past; she had begun to build a social life and had made two close friends.  She had always been a talented photographer and now, for the first time in years, had picked up her camera and was once again enjoying this form of creative expression.

I was pleased with our work but was not deluded into thinking that she had finished therapy, nor was I surprised, as our final session approached, to see a recrudescence of her old symptoms.  She retreated to bed for entire weekends; she had long crying jags; suicide suddenly seemed appealing again.  Just after our last visit, I received a sad letter from her containing these lines:

I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life.  I don't want to be "just another patient."  I wanted to be "special."  I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one.  If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn't forget.  I'd exist then.

Marge, please understand that though I've written a story about you, I do not do it to enable you to exist.  You exist without my thinking or writing about you, just as I keep existing when you aren't thinking about me.

Yet this is an existence story - but one written for the other Marge, the one who no longer exists.  I was willing to be her executioner, to sacrifice her for you.  But I have not forgotten her: she avenged herself by burning her image into my memory.