Favourite Passages Or Lines From Your Favourite Books.

[Reigh Kaufman]

It's a bit harder and requires more thought, but we all have pieces of writing that we love from our favourite books.

Here's just a few obvious one's of mine:

'Anyway, I keep picturing these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye...'

'Then she introduced me to the Navy guy. His name was Commander Blop or something.

From TheCatcher In the Rye

'There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.
'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.

'I'm cold, 'Snowden whimpered. 'I'm cold.'
'There, there, ' Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. 'There, there.'
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in the entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.'

From Catch-22

'When Roberta died, some talking person among the Fields Foundation fellows at Dog's Head Harbour called Helen on the phone. Helen, gathering hersef - once again -would be the one to call Duncan in Vermont. Helen would be the one to advise young Jenny how to break the news to Duncan. Jenny had inherited a fine bedside manner from her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields.
'Bad news, Duncan,' young Jenny whispered, kissing her brother on the lips. 'Old Number Ninety has dropped the ball.'

From The World According to Garp

[Morgana]

Excellent topic! Here's one of my favorite passages from a book I read in college, and it still remains a favorite to this day. The book is about a teenager from the former Communist GDR.

'Naturally jeans! Or can you imagine a life without jeans? Jeans are the greatest pants in the world. For jeans I'd give up all the synthetic rags in Jumo (a large department store in former East Berlin) that always look squeaky clean. For jeans I would give up everything, except maybe for the finest thing. And except for music. I don't mean just an old Handelsohn Bacholdy, I mean genuine music, people. I didn't have anything against Bacholdy or the others, but they didn't exactly sweep me off my feet. Of course I mean real jeans. There's a whole pile of junk that just pretends to be jeans. If that's all I could get I'd rather not have any at all. Real jeans, for example, don't have a zipper in the front. There is only one kind of real jeans. A real jeans wearer knows what I mean. That doesn't mean that everyone who wears real jeans is a real jeans wearer. Most of them don't even know what they're wearing. It always killed me when I saw some twenty-five-year-old fogy with jeans on that he's forced up over his bloated thighs and then belted up tight at the waist. Jeans are supposed to be hip pants, I mean they're pants that will slip off your hips if you don't buy them small enough, and they stay up by friction. You naturally can't have fat hips and certainly not a fat ass, because otherwise they won't snap together. People over twenty-five are too dense to grasp that. That is, if they're card-carrying Communists and beat their wives. I mean, jeans are an attitude and not just pants. Sometimes I think that people shouldn't be allowed to get older than seventeen or eighteen. After that they get a job or go to college or join the army and then there's no reasoning with them anymore. At least I haven't known any. Maybe nobody understands me.'


From The New Sufferings of Young W, by Ulrich Plenzdorf.

[Annie Hall]

One of my favorites from Franny and Zooey:

"This is Gods universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don't! But you'd like your friend Professor Tupper's ego taken away from him. That's different. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But don't go screaming about egos in general. In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos."

[NumberMSO52]

The entire chapter about Raymond K. Hessel in Fight Club is great.

Also this passage in Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk(my favorite book)...

Most everything i know is from the messes these people leave behind.
Just ask me how to get bloodstains out of a fur coat
No, really. Go ahead
Ask me.
The secret is cornmeal and brushing the fur the wrong way. The tricky part is keeping your mouth shut.
To get blood off of piano keys, polish them with talcum powder or powdered milk.
This isnt the most marketable job skill, but to get bloodstains out of wallpaper, put on a paste of cornstarch and cold water. This will work just as well to get blood out of a matress or a davenport. The trick is to forget how fast these things can happen. Accidents. Suicides. Crimes of passion.
Just concentrate on the stain until your memory is completely erased. Practice really does make perfect. If you could call it that.
Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth. You have a god-given knack for commiting a terrible sin. It's your calling. You have a natural gift for denial. A blessing.
If you could call it that.
Even after sixteen years of cleaning people's houses, i want to think the world is getting better and better, but really i know it's not. You want there to be some improvement in people, but there won't be. And you want to think there's something you can get done.
Cleaning this same house every day, all that gets better is my skill at denying what's wrong.
God forbid i should ever meet who i work for in person.

Just one of many great passages in that book.

[Romero&Juliet]

this is from Arthur rimbaud's 'Un saison En enfer.'(a Season in Hell). The translation is a little bad, but it'll have to do.

I'd hate to give an introduction, it'd kinda be a shame to pin it down... I kinda jumped in the middle of a huge piece, so it may be a little necesary:
this is the disection of Arthur's own creative process ....kind of like he's being forced to confront these philosophies that he saw as his only earthly posession.

Arthur, at the age of seventeen, left his farming town with these really ridiculous aspirations of becoming a 'voyant', without realizing that people simply cannot live on art!

"Who made my tongue so perfidious that it has guided and preserved/ my sloth up until now? Without making use of my body in any way, and/ lazier than a toad, I have lived Everywhere. I know every Family in/ Europe. I mean families like my own who owe everything to the Declaration/ of the right of Man. and I have known every eldest son."

[the night watchman]

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell…”
-Mark Twain “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

“And if you hear me sobbing once in a while, it’s only because you’ve killed me, too, you fuckers.
“I’m stuck on this spinning place with you, and I don’t want to go, and you’ve killed me, and I resent it …”
-Harlan Ellison “Reaping the Whirlwind”

“On the instant when we come to realise that tragedy is second-hand.”
-William Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury"

“Gods mean nothing
to those without guilt.”
-Bill Whitson “Atheist Kindergartners”

“Anythin’ interestin’ in the world come out of somebody’s weird thoughts ...”
-Barry Gifford "Lula, Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor & Lula"

“[. . .] Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”
-Edward Albee “Zoo Story”

“An Author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an Animal whom everybody is privileged to attack; For though All are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them . . .”
-Matthew Lewis “The Monk”

“For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.”
-Eudora Welty “Moon Lake”

[Jerk Shapiro]

The last line of the amazing novel THE GIVER.

[Tingles]

"I am Modam, beware my frightfully large head"
Captain America V3 #3