I just got back from a run. I have a lake close to my house that is somewhere around 3 miles in circumference. It was absolutely beautiful today. I got to thinking on the wind down about my favorite books, and then my favorite lines I’ve read. Lines that I have engrained in my memory despite reading them years ago.
One immediately jumped out to me, from Capote’s “In Cold Blood”. I’ll need to fill you in on a little bit of context here if you haven’t read it (skip to the quote at the bottom if you have). The book is basically a true crime novel written in the form of a novel with embellishments to fill in the gaps. Dialogue, some minor events, etc. One of the suspects of the crime is named Perry. At some point in the book, the lead detective of the case speaks with Perry’s sister, who lives in San Francisco, her name is Bobo Johnson. After the police chief leaves, Mrs. Johnson pulls out old photos to remember her family. All of her family, excluding Perry, were deceased. Both parents, a brother Jimmy, and a sister Fern. The scene ends like this:
“The garden was white with sea fog; it might have been an assembly of spirits: Mama and Jimmy and Fern. When Mrs. Johnson bolted the door, she had in mind the dead as well as the living.”
I don’t know I’ve ever had such a visceral reaction to a line from a book. I still get goosebumps.
by Mindless_Patient2034
7 Comments
That Capote line is absolutely haunting, I can see why it stuck with you so hard. There’s something about how he weaves the fog into this ghostly presence that makes your skin crawl in the best way
Mine would probably be from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” – “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” I was debugging a particularly brutal network issue at 2 AM when I first read that and it hit me like a truck. Sometimes in IT you spend hours chasing problems that don’t actually have solutions, or at least not the ones you’re looking for. That line changed how I approach both code and life – knowing when to step back instead of banging your head against something is weirdly profound. Plus Le Guin just had this way of dropping philosophical bombs in the middle of sci-fi that made you question everything
When he stares, valleys tremble. Where he walks, beasts are silent, when he speaks, mountains tumble, when he fights, armies crumble
It’s a painful thing to read and it makes me cry out of frustration and sadness over how little has changed, but that’s why it’s so great. It was written 88 years ago and it still brings me to tears every time. The quote is from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.“
I memorized several verses of Ulysses when I was in Jr High and recite it often. I bought a Ulysses poster from the school book fair and hung it by my bed. Stared at that thing for years imagining my life ahead. “I cannot rest from travel, I will drink life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me and alone…”❤️
“We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.”
“I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.”
-R in Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”