/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2173326]

In your mind what is the best paragraph you have ever read?

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2173334]

[Anonymous No.2173337]

the first to come to mind --


A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief's bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone's poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go right straight to bed.

[ϟ EDELKIND ϟ !Ry9.HRD23k No.2173340]

>>2173326
>In your mind

RATHER THAN WHERE? MY BODY; MY STOMACH, MY HEART, MY LIVER?

[Anonymous No.2173355]

>>2173340
Its a figure of speak but k

[ϟ EDELKIND ϟ !Ry9.HRD23k No.2173358]

>>2173355

IT IS REDUNDANT.

[Anonymous No.2173359]

>>2173340
>My heart, my liver
Well then, what's the best paragraph to your reason, to your will, and to your passion Mr. Renaissance?

[Anonymous No.2173362]

>>2173358
ps your face is redundant

[Anonymous No.2173370]

There are two from American Psycho that really had an effect on me.

“….where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failures, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”

[Anonymous No.2173372]

and....

“….and in the southern deserts of Sudan the heat rises in airless waves, thousands upon thousands of men, women, children, roam throughout the vast bush land, desperately seeking food. Ravaged and staving, leaving a trail of dead, emaciated bodies, they eat weeds and leaves and…lily pads, stumbling from village to village, dying slowly, inexorably; a gray mooring in the miserable desert, a grit flies through the air, a child with a face like a black moon lies in the sand, scratching at his throat, cones of dust rising, flying across land like whirling tops, no one can see the sun, the child is covered with sand, almost dead, eyes unblinking, grateful (stop and imagine for an instant a world where someone is grateful for something) none of the haggard pay attention as they file by, dazed and in pain (no-there is one who pays attention, who notices the boy’s agony and smiles, as if holding a secret), the boy opens and closes his cracked, chapped mouth soundlessly, there is a school bus in the distance somewhere and somewhere else, above that, in space, a spirit rises, a door opens, and it asks “Why?”-a home for the dead, an infinity, it hangs in a void, time limps by, love and sadness rush through the boy…”

[Anonymous No.2173378]

Northrop Frye on National Consciousness in Canadian Culture.

In the previous paragraph, Frye identifies the central image of Canadian fear and guilt: "the blank world of white snow stained with the blood of murdered animals". I love this man.

[Anonymous No.2173381]

"She always appeared out of the darkness, like a shadow leaving its kindred element. At first her ankles would catch the light: she moved them close together as if she walked along a slender rope. Her summer dress was short, of night's own color, the color of the streetlights and the shadows, of tree trunks and of shining pavement--paler than her bare arms and darker than her face...Fyodor kissed her on her soft lips, she leaned her head for a moment on his collarbone and then, quickly freeing herself, walked beside him, at first with such sorrow on her face as if during their twenty hours of separation an unheard-of disaster had taken place, but then little by little she came to herself and now smiled--smiled as she never did during the day...And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." -Nabokov, The Gift

It rings in my head occasionally at night.

[Anonymous No.2173382]

Maybe the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick?

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

I really didn't like M-D much as a whole, but Melville's writing is exquisite, I think.

[Anonymous No.2173386]

"On the Road", last paragraph

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the the prarie, which is just before the coming of of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady"

[Anonymous No.2173392]

>>2173382
I always liked the "some people commit suicide, I jump on boats" thing in there. Especially with the utter destruction at the end.

[Anonymous No.2173406]

Both soothed, they began discussing a report which they would soon be sending to a foreign observatory, at Arcetri. Supported, guided, it seemed, by calculations which were invisible at that hour yet ever present, the stars cleft the ether in those exact trajectories of theirs. The comets would be appearing as usual, punctual to the fraction of a second, in sight of whoever was observing them. THey were not messengers of catastrophe as Stella thought; on the contrary, their appearance at the time forseen was a triumph of the human mind's capacity to project itself and to partipate in the sublime routie o fthe skies. "Let's leave the Bendicos down there running after rustic prey, and the cooks' knives chopping the flesh of innocent beasts. From up in this observatory the bluster of hte one and the blood on the other merge into tranquil harmony. The real problem is how to go on living this life of the spirit in its most sublimated moments, those moments that are most like death."

[Anonymous No.2173412]

>>2173382

i came, it's like the "in the destructive element immerse" from lord jim but 100x better

[Anonymous No.2173413]

>>2173386
I've never read that book, but that paragraph was beautiful.

[Anonymous No.2173432]

>>2173386

what happened to "and don't you know that God is pooh-bear?"

[Anonymous No.2173433]

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

[Anonymous No.2173437]

"So I say to Niquan, "DAYUM GURL, I WANNA BE ALL UP IN DAT PHAT ASS." Niquan back dat sweet ass up slowly and my anaconda goes solid like my nigga Daddy Phantastic's beats. Niquan throw back her big ass booty and says, "'Sup big boy, you lookin' for some fun?'" Now I ain't no freaky-deaky white boy, but I'm feelin' a bit honky an outta place all up in dis cracka's street. I decide to take her up brown town an' when we get back to my crib she's already been smoked on the crack rock. I tell her, "DAYUM GURL, AIN'T Y'ALL NEVER SEEN NO GODDAM TOOTY-FRUITY? And then my teacher almost raped me."

-Da Catcher in da Freakass Rye: An Afro-American Interpretation of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye by Da'fwan Yamal

[Anonymous No.2173447]

I like this one from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

[Anonymous No.2173456]

>>2173447

read jane bowles

[Anonymous No.2173461]

Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and at last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

[Anonymous No.2173474]

Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

[Anonymous No.2173513]

Imperium by Robert Harris. Cicero prosecutes Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, on the charges of torturing and murdering a citizen.

"But you said it!" cried Cicero triumphantly, wheeling on him, his finger jabbing in outrage. "You admit he said it! Out of your own mouth I accuse you -- the man claimed to be a Roman citizen, and you did nothing! This mention of citizenship did not lead you to hesitate or delay, even for a little, the infliction of this cruel and disgusting death! If you, Verres, had been made a prisoner in Persia or the remotest part of India and were being dragged off to execution, what cry would you be uttering ,except that you were a Roman citizen? What then of this man whom you were hurrying to his death. Could not that statement, that claim of citizenship, have saved him for an hour, for a day, while its truth was checked? No it could not -- not with you in the judgment seat! And yet the poorest man, of humblest birht, in whatever savage land, has always until now had the confidence to know that the cry "I am a Roman citizen" is his final defense and sanctuary. It was not Gavius, not one obscure man, whom you nailed upon that cross of agony: it was the universal principle that Romans are free men!"

I legitimately get tears reading that even though I've read the book like 4 times now

[Anonymous No.2173528]

>>2173456
Why? Is she any good?

[Anonymous No.2173533]

>>2173528

wicked good. better than her husband, imho

[Anonymous No.2173538]

From James Joyce's The Dead. To me, the most beautiful piece of English language prose ever written.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. 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.

[Anonymous No.2173546]

The opening to A Hundred Years of Solitude is hard to beat:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

[Anonymous No.2173551]

“Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it. Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage. It had nothing to do with the Silver Star...Oh, he would've liked winning it, true, but that wasn't the issue. He would've liked showing the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn't the real issue. The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him.”

[Anonymous No.2173556]

>>2173370
Damn that's good.

[Anonymous No.2173560]

From Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass:

"The daemons flew back down now, and changed again, and came toward them over the soft sand. Lyra sat up to greet them, and Will marveled at the way he could instantly tell which daemon was which, never mind what form they had. Pantalaimon was now an animal whose name he couldn't quite find: like a large and powerful ferret, red-gold in color, lithe and sinuous and full of grace. Kirjava was a cat again. But she was a cat of no ordinary size, and her fur was lustrous and rich, with a thousand different glints and shades of ink black, shadow gray, the blue of a deep lake under a noon sky, mist-lavender-moonlight-fog... To see the meaning of the word subtlety, you had only to look at her fur.

"A marten," he said, finding the name for Pantalaimon, "a pine marten."

"Pan," Lyra said as he flowed up onto her lap, "you're not going to change a lot anymore, are you?"

"No," he said.

"It's funny," she said, "you remember when we were younger and I didn't want you to stop changing at all... Well, I wouldn't mind so much now. Not if you stay like this."

Will put his hand on hers. A new mood had taken hold of him, and he felt resolute and peaceful. Knowing exactly what he was doing and exactly what it would mean, he moved his hand from Lyra's wrist and stroked the red-gold fur of her daemon."

[Anonymous No.2173563]

>>2173560
Lyra gasped. But her surprise was mixed with a pleasure so like the joy that flooded through her when she had put the fruit to his lips that she couldn't protest, because she was breathless. With a racing heart she responded in the same way: she put her hand on the silky warmth of Will's daemon, and as her fingers tightened in the fur, she knew that Will was feeling exactly what she was.

And she knew, too, that neither daemon would change now, having felt a lover's hands on them. These were their shapes for life: they would want no other.

So, wondering whether any lovers before them had made this blissful discovery, they lay together as the earth turned slowly and the moon and stars blazed above them."

More like a passage than a paragraph, I guess, but whatever.

[Anonymous No.2173565]

>>2173432

>what happened to "and don't you know that God is pooh-bear?"

That line is included in the first (censored) version of the novel. The paragraph posted here is the original, unedited (or less edited) version

[Anonymous No.2173567]

“Oh my fucking god damn shit baby Jesus I love
cheese fucking sandwiches.” Lucifer Niggerbastard
said as he watched a football player shove a pencil up
his ass. The announcer for the Fucking Asshole Gay
network moaned the voiceover, screaming about
fucking rabid geese with a stick and putting his nose
in a shemale’s penishole. The sack of babyshit pressed
itself against the remote, smeared greasy crap onto
the buttons until the channel changed. A giant dick
filled the screen, and then there was a toothless
crackwhore yammering about how loose her stinky
pussy was and how much like a honkey’s asscrack it
smelled. The sack of babyshit changed the channel
again and Lucifer threw his sandwich at the T.V.

[Anonymous No.2173570]

>>2173340
>Argue semantics
>Contribute nothing

[Anonymous No.2173574]

>>2173563
is this... furry /lit/?

if so, get the fuck out

if i'm mistaken, i apologise

[Anonymous No.2173579]

I shall post an excert from cat's cradle.

[1/2 No.2173587]

>>2173579

>It is titled "The Grand Ah-whoom"

The ragged rim of oblivion was now inches from my curling toes. I looked down. My lukewarm sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea, the only trace of all that fell.
The palace, its massive, seaward mask now gone, greeted the north with a leper’s smile, snuggle-toothed and bristly. The bristles were the splintered ends of timbers. Immediately below me a large chamber had been laid open. The floor of that chamber, unsupported, stabbed out into space like a diving platform.
I dreamed for a moment of dropping to the platform, of springing up from it in a breath-taking swan dive, of folding my arms, of knifing downward into a blood-warm eternity with never a splash.
I was recalled from this dream by the cry of a darting bird above me. It seemed to be asking me what had happened. ‘Poo-tee-phweet?’ it asked.
We all looked up at the bird, and then at one another.
We backed away from the abyss, full of dread. And, when I stepped off the paving stone that had supported me, the stone began to rock. It was no more stable than a teeter-totter. And it tottered now over the diving platform.

[1/2 No.2173588]

>>2173587

Down it crashed onto the platform, made the platform a chute. And down the chute came the furnishings still remaining in the room below.
A xylophone shot out first, scampering fast on its tiny wheels.
Out came a bedside table in a crazy race with a bounding blowtorch. Out came chairs in hot pursuit.
And somewhere in that room below, out of sight, something mightily reluctant to move was beginning to move.
Down the chute it crept. At last it showed its golden bow. It was the boat in which dead ‘Papa’ lay.
It reached the end of the chute. Its bow nodded. Down it tipped. Down it fell, end over end.
‘Papa’ was thrown clear, and he fell separately.
I closed my eyes.
There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM.
I opened my eyes – and all the sea was ice-nine.
The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl.
The sky darkened. Borasisi, the sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel.
The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.

[Anonymous No.2173604]

One that has really stuck with me is from Blood Meridian, and lots did in that book, certainly.

>"They were crossing the western edge of the playa when Glanton halted. He turned and placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples."

Something about that last sentence stuck with me. The rugged simplicity punctuated by biblical grandeur of the words really struck me.

[Anonymous No.2173605]

>>2173574
>mfw calling the Northern Lights trilogy "furry lit"
No, YOU get out.

[Anonymous No.2173634]

this

[Anonymous No.2173698]

"Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it... Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim 'I do enjoy myself' or 'I am horrified' we are insincere. As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror – it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent."
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Rarely do you see nihilistic opinions expressed eloquently.

[InquisitorJoe !!rEkSWzi2+mz No.2173702]

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

Severian, Chapter 1: Resurrection and Death
Gene Wolfe's Shadow and Claw

[Anonymous No.2173718]

>>2173604
That was pretty much the entire book.

[Anonymous No.2173721]

>>2173605
wasn't phillip pullman outed as a furry like a few years ago?

[Anonymous No.2174347]

>>2173721
Not to my knowledge.

[Anonymous No.2174358]

There is silence. The set goes black. One lone face appears, illuminated by candlelight. It looks upwards, towards an unknowable heaven, and an even more mysterious Lord. The fifth Horseman, Comedy, rides rough over the plains, and trumpets the true end. Somewhere, a child is born, and does not cry, but instead laughs. A man on trial for murder laughs as the prosecution delivers expert testimony; the judge, while in the middle of chastising him, laughs as well. As does the family of the victim, and then the entire court. The victim, long dead and stiff with cold, laughs, muffled by the confines of the morgue shelf they are in. They are joined by many more muffled laughs. If they are alive, if only for one second, it is to laugh, and nothing more. A new constellation forms in the sky, and it forms the letters L, O, and L. Brighter than the moon, they shine down upon all providence, and all who see it know what makes the world. Not pain, or cold reason, but laughter. Pure laughter.

[Anonymous No.2174366]

A gurl was walkin2 skewl wit her bf n they were crossin da rode.

she sed "bbz will u luv me 4evr"

he said "NO..""

da gurl cryed N ran across da rode b4 da green man came on the sine.

boy was cryin and went to pic up her body.

she was ded.

he whispered 2 her corpse "I ment 2 sey i will luv u FIVE-ever..." (dat mean he luv her moar den 4evr)

xxx~*...like dis if u cry evry time...~*xxx

[Anonymous No.2174368]

"Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?"
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

[Anonymous No.2174370]

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A VHS INTO THE SLOT. ITS CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE MOVES ALONGSIDE WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER, RIDDICK. I DO EVERY MOVE AND I DO EVERY MOVE HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME NECRO BASTARDS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY ESCAPED THE GALAXY’S MOST DANGEROUS PRISON. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY COLLEGE CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN COLLEGE CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JERKS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE LINES AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY SHOUTING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNING.

[Dr. Seussicide (SLAF) No.2174386]

They crouch and follow the phone-lit footsteps of the Greatest Dad in the World. And they travel in quiet.

- Pink, S., 2010. The Self-esteem Holocaust Comes Home. Lazy Fascist Press. The Bastards [They Travel In Quiet- With The Holy Father Landing Crew]) p.20

[Sunhawk !M9PhF5nIzs No.2174397]

It's a paragraph from 2666, where it's talking about how badly Achimboldi's novels are selling. I can't find it online though, oh well. Great bits of prose in it.

[Anonymous No.2174420]

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

[Anonymous No.2176393]

bump before it dies

this thread deserves more

[Anonymous No.2176419]

>>2173433
This. Runner up:

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant..."

[Anonymous No.2176436]

Maybe not the best, but the first one that came to mind, from 'Post Office':

But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman
just bursting out of her dress . .. a sex creature, a curse, the end
of it all. I looked up and there she was, down at the end of the
bar. She was about drunk and the bartender wouldn't serve her
and she began to bitch and they called one of the track cops and
the track cop had her by the arm, leading her off, and they were
talking.

[Anonymous No.2176437]

>>2173702

Wow someone else has found this gem. I just finished reading Book Of The New Sun and it has the most beautiful lines I've ever read. Here's one of the many fantastic paragraphs that stood out for me:

"Still wet from Gyoll we waited. In the recesses of my mind we stand shivering there even now. Just as all that appears imperishable tends toward its own destruction, those moments that at the time seem the most fleeting recreate themselves - not only in my memory (which in the final accounting loses nothing) but in the throbbing of my heart and the prickling of my hair, making themselves new just as our Commonwealth reconstitutes itself each morning in the shrill tones of its own clarions."

[Anonymous No.2176443]

>>2176419
>>2174420

I fucking love Thompson's prose.

[ϟ EDELKIND ϟ !Ry9.HRD23k No.2176459]

>>2173570

>COMPLAIN ABOUT PERSON CORRECTING ANOTHER PERSON.
>CONTRIBUTE NOTHING.

[Anonymous No.2176464]

--upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay streched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments--(pause)--after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

[Anonymous No.2176471]

The model was like a man lying on his back. The nave was his legs placed together, the transepts on either side were his arms outspread. The choir was his body; and the Lady Chapel where now the services would be held, was his head. And now also, springing, projecting, bursting, erupting from the heart of the building, there was its crown and majesty, the new spire. They don't know, he thought, they can't know until I tell them of my vision! And laughing again for joy, he went out of the chapter house to where the sun piled into the open square of the cloisters. And I must remember that the spire isn't everything! I must do, as far as possible, exactly what I have always done.

Taken from the beginning of The Spire by William Golding. It isn't the best I've ever read (I don't know the answer to that question) but it is one that has stuck with me for a long, long time. The imagery is fantastic, and this short paragraph sums up so much of the novel it's wonderful. That's why I love The Spire though, everything is related, everything comes together to create something beautiful.

[Anonymous No.2176479]

>>2176459
It's an image board on the internet. Nobodys contribution amounts to much.

[ϟ EDELKIND ϟ !Ry9.HRD23k No.2176485]

>>2176479

THE "WORTH" OF AN OPINION IS RELATIVE.

[Anonymous No.2176511]

To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterised by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative: that is to say, not 'inspiration' as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers - which tend to re-form very quickly. Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden.

-T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

[Anonymous No.2176568]

"I was married but rarely saw my wife. She was afraid of me: The enormity of my mind overwhelmed her. She did not so much live, as tremble; and if I as much as looked at her, she would begin to hiccup. We lived together for a long time, but then I think she disappeared somewhere. I don't remember exactly."

[Anonymous No.2176590]

>>2176568

Is it really so hard for you to type those few extra words so that we know the title and author?

[Anonymous No.2176610]

>>2176590

In the time it took you to type that out, you could have just cut and pasted the text into Google and found out the author and title with the first result.

[Anonymous No.2176617]

>>2176610

That's right, I could've done that, but my post wasn't about getting any info on the post as I don't really care for the extract, it was more about making a point about how much of an ass I think he is for not putting such obvious information into a post.

[Anonymous No.2176622]

>>2176617

Your argument is invalid now that you've revealed that you don't even like the extract.

Goodbye.