So many books. So many talented authors.
What is a line or passage that has stuck with you?
I was reading a fantasy book called prince of thorns, and when describing starvation he simply says :
“If you see a piece of moldy bread, and your mouth doesn’t water, then you’re not proper hungry”
And it stuck with me. Made me think the depths we would go , how low we would accept, if we were hungry enough.
Is there a line or passage like that, when you read it, really made an impact on you?
Would love to hear
by bwils3423
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“There are no ugly questions, except those clothed in condescension.” – Lee, “East of Eden”
For me it’s this quote from Murakami’s 1Q84: “You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.” I actually came across this quote many years before I even read the book (which I didn’t even like lol), and it has stuck with me for a long time because I see myself in it. I was pretty shy as a teenager and I hid behind that shyness to protect myself, but I knew that I could not hide forever, and that one day someone would see behind the front. I’m not as shy anymore, but the quote still has a special place in my heart; now, I see it more as “you can run as far away from yourself/your fate as you’d like, but one day you/it will catch up to you.”
“I know, too, that Death is the only god who comes when you call”
From Zelazny’s “Frost and Fire”
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” (*On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux*) – one of many lines from *The Little Prince* that linger in my mind.
“Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett
I do not know if it is a lasting impact, but I think about it occasionally. The Litany of Fear from Frank Herbert’s Dune.
“There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe.”
This one, from The Sea Wolf by Jack London.
“Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was precisely similar. I have related this in order to show the mental caliber of the men with whom I was thrown in contact. Intellectually they were children,
inhabiting the physical forms of men.”
I think I got it from some little free library right around 2016 during the US election cycle and hitting this passage right after watching one of those nightmare “debates” they had.
Two of my favorites from my early twenties. Thankfully, the first one at least doesn’t feel quite as much like it was written for me as it did back then.
“He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in a series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.” — JD Salinger, For Esme With Love & Squalor.
“The more he thought about it, the angrier he got.” — Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections.
“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance anymore.”
– Kurt Vonnegut