/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3590368]

Favorite paragraphs thread /lit/?

>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, on 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.3590378]

fucking loved that book

god damn it i wish I could be 14 again and re-read all the books that made me who i am

those first time read feels

[Anonymous No.3590384]

>sleepily
>obliquely
>softly
>lonely
>thickly
>slowly
>faintly
>faintly

[Anonymous No.3590447]

“Time heals.

No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue is not a good thing. It is merely the wound's other face.”

[Anonymous No.3590457]

>>3590384
muh creative writing teachings

[Anonymous No.3590489]

>>3590384
Yeah, King was wrong.
Deal with it.

[Anonymous No.3590500]

>>3590384
yeah I was brainwashed for a while too. someone so prolific can't be mistaken!

[Anonymous No.3590504]

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...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 of 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.”
- Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

[Anonymous No.3590508]

>>3590384
>>3590489
I'm surprised so many have latched onto the "no adverbs" rule like it was golden law.

To begin with, King's prose is bland as all fuck. That he's so against adverbs makes sense, given his particular product.

Why wouldn't anyone be wary of someone advocating cutting a long-used tool out of the profession? It's like a carpenter strongly urging novices not to use a level or an awl. Why would anyone lend this any credence?

[Anonymous No.3590511]

"He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away."

[Anonymous No.3590561]

>>3590368
eveline almost reaches the level of despair in flaubert's a simple heart. the rest is worthless. this is knowledge, monsieur. but joyce, ah, joyce, Joyce was a STUPID. there you have it, monsieur, from the horse's mouth. tell all.

[Anton Chekhov No.3590679]

>>3590368
“To-morrow at twelve o’clock I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men, but before I leave this room and see the sunshine, I think it necessary to say a few words to you. With a clear conscience I tell you, as before God, who beholds me, that I despise freedom and life and health, and all that in your books is called the good things of the world.
For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women. . . . Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds’ pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God. . . .

[Anonymous No.3590680]

>>3590679
cont.
In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms. . . .
Your books have given me wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you.
And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don’t want to understand you.”
(From “The Bet”)

[Anonymous No.3590898]

>>3590368
> When I reached home everyone was excited. Next day the neighbors came to congratulate me. I even felt safe from grandfather, whose deathbed curse usually spoiled my triumphs. I stood beneath his photograph with my brief case in hand and smiled triumphantly into his stolid black peasant's face. It was a face that fascinated me. The eyes seemed to follow everywhere I went.
> That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my brief case and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. "Them's years," he said. "Now open that one." And I did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold. "Read it," my grandfather said. "Out loud."
> "To Whom It May Concern," I intoned. "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."
> I awoke with the old man's laughter ringing in my ears.

[Anonymous No.3590941]

>>3590368
>Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep

[Anonymous No.3590945]

As Archer Slone had done, he realized the futility and waste of committing one's self wholly to the irrational and dark forced that impelled the world to its unknown end; as Archer Sloane had not done, Stoner withdrew a little distance to pity and love, so that he was not caught in the rushing that he observed. And as in other moments of crisis and despair, he looked again to the cautious faith that was embodied in the institution of the University. He told himself that it was not much; but he knew that it was all he had.

[Anonymous No.3590947]

>>3590898
Invisible Man, right?

[Anonymous No.3591122]

>>3590384
>implying King is fit to clean Joyce's boots

[Anonymous No.3591135]

>Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

[Anonymous No.3591147]

>>3590384
I recently read Stephen King On Writing too. I like him and I think cutting back on adverbs is basically a good idea.

But let's be honest, Dubliners > King's entire career.

[Anonymous No.3591198]

>>3590898
God, what a terrible book.

[Anonymous No.3591484]

>>3591147
Giving the advice to cut down on adverbs I think works for amateur writers because too many adverbs can easily clutter up your sentences. It's stupid to say that one should never use them though, because there are definitely places where they work. The whole "no adverbs" thing should be more of a rule of thumb and not an axiom.

[Anonymous No.3593222]

I really like that bit from Araby when the boy is watching the girl from across the porch with the light playing on her face. I think that's how it went anyway. Here it is:

>While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps, and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

[Anonymous No.3593231]

>>3590378
>that time you read Dubliners at 16 over the course of a couple of hours and it changed you in so many ways

[Anonymous No.3593323]

>>3590368
That ending made the story worth it. I remember having to read it for my short story class and being bored to tears until the end.

[Anonymous No.3593336]

>>3593231
saturday afternoon at my grandparent's house. finished the dead just before dinner. very first experience with joyce. my god.

[mrkitty No.3593371]

>>3593222
That line in araby,
>"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity."
All my feels.

[Anonymous No.3593646]

>>3591198
God, what a terrible comment.

[Anonymous No.3593677]

It's the first paragraph of the book, which I know is cheating but goddamn:

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

[Anonymous No.3594459]

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

[Anonymous No.3594510]

From the Bianca chapter of Gravity's rainbow.

>Of all her putative fathers--Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken night, on the other--Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying, sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker ... She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody had to tell you.

[Anonymous No.3594530]

Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St. Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.

[Anonymous No.3594532]

>>3594459
i read that freshman year of college and wanted to drop out

[Anonymous No.3594670]

>>3590368

yes, op, the immortality in letters. Every goddamned pleb wondering why Joyce is the man should read this story.

[Anonymous No.3594679]

the end of No country for old men:

But the second
one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the
mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on
the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he
had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he
was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside
of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he
was fixin to make afire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that
whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

[Anonymous No.3594681]

>>3590504

is this the preacher's talk in the end ? I've read it only in my own language long time ago but this reminds me why I love this book so much

[Anonymous No.3594715]

>>3590368
I don't think this book has ever been translated into English, but I remember the first sentence by heart and it roughly translates into:

"The Oulhamr fled through the terrible night. Mad with pain and fatigue, all was vain to them before the supreme calamity: Fire was dead."

[Anonymous No.3595587]

>>3593371
I just read the whole story out loud to myself and broke down crying at the end. Fuck.

[Anonymous No.3596141]

The opening of On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense by Frederich Nietzsche.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.

[Anonymous No.3596156]

From McCarthy's The Crossing, after Billy lost the wolf in a dog fight and before he returns home to find his parents killed he comes across some Indians in his wondering.

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy's saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huérfano.

Huérfano is Spanish for orphan.

[Anonymous No.3596170]

Most definitely this paragraph from "The Castaway" chapter of Moby-Dick:


> But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

[Anonymous No.3596213]

>>3596170
And before I read that book I thought I was fluent in English. Poor me.

[Anonymous No.3596226]

>>3596141
Fuck me this thread is good.
It's a good way to read some books.

[Anonymous No.3597528]

>>3596156

this quote gives another proof that Cormac is the best living author in the world. With only a few worlds he's creating deep spaces of emotions. And I'm a reader who's not fond of american literature in general !