/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15499159]

What are some passages in literature which you think could not have possibly been written better?

[Anonymous No.15499216]

>in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

[Anonymous No.15499219]

>>15499216
also
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

[Anonymous No.15499221]

>>15499216
>And
>And
>And
had he not created proper transitions yet either?

[Anonymous No.15499228]

>>15499221
Moses knew he had a lot of writing to do, it probably wasn't a priority to be eloquent.

[Anonymous No.15499230]

>“Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”

[Anonymous No.15499367]

>>15499159
The Pub segment of Crime and Punishment.

[Anonymous No.15499375]

>>15499230
What is this from?

[Anonymous No.15499419]

>>15499375

[Anonymous No.15500075]

>>15499159
Opening of Lolita

[Anonymous No.15500818]

>And when his power is ripe, then, in a gesture gentler than the culling of a flower, the pilot severs the ship from the water and establishes it in the air.
great climax to a great buildup

[Anonymous No.15500991]

>"I traveled far into Earth's future, where all was peace and harmony and everyone was perfect and snotty... They viewed me as some kind of Neanderthal, because my forehead didn'tweigh 80 pounds like theirs did, so they chucked me into a cage... We spent four months there, with our keepers treating us as if we were brutal Neanderthals. We tried to convince them we were humans of great sophistication and cultural advancement, just like them, but they weren't buying it. In the end we managed to escape by being brutally Neanderthal and bashing their overdeveloped heads in, getting so excited while we were doing it that we screamed and jumped around like monkeys. I'm not proud of that."

[Anonymous No.15501009]

>>15500991
Sounds like Douglas Adams, where is it from?

[Anonymous No.15501260]

>>15501009
John Schwartzwelder's Detective Novel "The Time Machine Did It"
>"She held me close and whispered in my ear how wonderful I was. Since I'm not wonderful, I was pretty sure this was a trap. So I figured I'd better grope her as much as I could before they sprung the trap. You've got to take what you can get in this life. I read that in a magazine. So I started smearing kisses on her and pawing the front of her dress, trying to get my money's worth before somebody bashed my head in."

[Anonymous No.15501327]

>>15501260
Amazing, I love it.

[Anonymous No.15501336]

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

[Anonymous No.15501350]

>>15499221
Translation makes it clunky, but the 'and's are the best way to convey the repetition and rhythm of the original

[Anonymous No.15501487]

>>15499230
This was the passage that made me cry when I first read Stoner. It's so beautifully sad