Favorite Lines in a book

I saw this quoted on another site two days ago and remembered I had jotted the same piece down in my reading notebook when I read its source work (years ago now).

From Nabokov's Speak Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

One of my favorite quotes from the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne

The opening paragraph of H. G. Well's The War of the Worlds. Sets the stage for what is to come beautifully. Richard Burton did a wonderful reading of it to open the concept album based on the novel by British producer Jeff Wayne.

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

Quote by Mendalla

The opening paragraph of H. G. Well's The War of the Worlds. Sets the stage for what is to come beautifully. Richard Burton did a wonderful reading of it to open the concept album based on the novel by British producer Jeff Wayne.

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

The magnificent opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Quote by verbal

Love this paragraph. Wells was one of my earliest sci-fi reads.

The magnificent opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

The Jackson opening is another great one. Just didn't think of it earlier. Should pull that novel down and read it again. I have that and a collection of her short stories on my shelf.

"After you, my dear Alphonse." (from Jackson's story of the same name, far creepier in context than it sounds)

From Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red: "You're no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you’re fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin’ down with a miserable bluesy beat and there’s two girls millin’ about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it’s three or four Sunday mornin’ and you ain’t slept since Thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain’t had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they’d taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, ’cause with crank you want something, anything, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin’ to waste since an article in The Scroll said the rich people whisked off to France or some such on a noteworthy vacation.

That’s how it happens.

Can’t none of this be new to you."

I often write down lines I like in books, as I did with this below. More a passage than a line, it is one of my favourites, from Sebastion Faulks's Engleby, words from the unreliable narrator in 1973, aimed at the year 2003 readers, which was when the novel was first published — and yes, the big block of text is how it is present in the novel itself.

1973 is the year I married my wife, aged just seventeen. We are still together — and no, she was not pregnant. Working-class teenagers used to marry young back then. They had jobs and money, were not infantilised by their parents, society at large.

Soz for the rant. Here is the text:

"Don’t patronise me if you read this thirty years on, will you? Don’t think of me as old fashioned, wearing silly clothes or some nonsense like that. Don’t talk crap about ‘the seventies’, will you, as we now do about /the forties’. I breathe air like you. I feel food in my bowel and a lingering taste of tea in my mouth. I’m alive, as you are. I’m as modern as you are, in my way — I couldn’t be more modern. My reality is complete as yours; the atoms making me and this world in their random movement are as terrible and strange and beautiful as those that make your world. Yours are in fact my atoms, reused. And you too, on your front edge of breaking time, Ms 2003, will be the object of condescending curiosity to the future — to Ms 2033 —. So don’t patronise me. (unless of course you have completely overturned and improved my world, bringing peace and plenty, and a cure for cancer and schizophrenia, and a unified scientific explanation of the universe comprehensible to all, and a satisfactory answer to the philosophical and religious questions of our time. In which case you would be permitted to patronise primitive little 1973. Well have you done those things? Got a cure for the common cold yet? Have you? Thought not. How’s your 2003 word then? A few wars? Some genocide? Some terrorism? Drugs? Abuse of children? High crime rate? Materialistic obsessions? More cars? Blah-blah pop music? Vulgar newspapers? Porn? Still wearing jeans? Though so. Yet you’ve had an extra thirty years to sort it out).

Mmm. Grammarly did not like some of that, and I might have rephrased a couple of things a little differently — but, hey!  It's a character speaking, not smarty-pants Mr Faulks himself.

This paragraph right here ALWAYS makes my heart flutter and sigh in absolute love with these characters all over again!

"Only His" by Elizabeth Lowell

Hesitantly, afraid to believe, she touched her trembling hand to Caleb’s cheek. His tears scalded her, burning through her hurt and confusion to the truth beneath. A sense of duty could force a man to avenge his sister at the risk of his own life. Duty could force him to risk his life to rescue Willow. Duty could force him to marry the girl he had seduced. But not even duty could force tears from a man as hard as Caleb Black.

If you've never read the "Only" series by Elizabeth Lowell, you really need to!!