Book Passages

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Do you have a favourite passage (or more than one) from a book you’ve read? Something, amusing, profound, silly…your choice.


Here’s one of mine, from Twain’s A Double-Barreled Detective Story:

‘It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.’

He got LOTS of mail about that. 

Boru

[Paraselene]

It was all good until that final word, and ironically the first paragraph of that tale doesn't draw the reader in.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It was all good until that final word, and ironically the first paragraph of that tale doesn't draw the reader in.

Umm…I think you may have missed the joke.

Boru

[Paraselene]

It was all good until that final word, and ironically the first paragraph of that tale doesn't draw the reader in.

Umm…I think you may have missed the joke.

Boru

Guess I have.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Umm…I think you may have missed the joke.

Boru

Guess I have.

 far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing;

Boru

[Paraselene]

I honestly figured it was just a fancy bird. But even knowing it's not, I still don't understand its placement or what it means.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I honestly figured it was just a fancy bird. But even knowing it's not, I still don't understand its placement or what it means.

Twain wrote that passage as a test to see if people would spot the word (it’s an old spelling of ‘esophagus’).

Boru

[Paraselene]

Humorous from a certain perspective, I suppose.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Here’s one that’s a little less esoteric:

‘There were a great many beds arranged around the walls, all of which looked as though they’d recently been slept in by perverted kangaroos.’ - from Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings

Boru

[Angrboda]

The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void, with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a way of maintaining control.

Why do we feel slightly crazy when we realize we have been lied to in a relationship?

We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: “In 19501 lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning’s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

I also have faith that you are telling me things it is important I should know; that you do not conceal facts from me in an effort to spare me, or yourself, pain. Or, at the very least, that you will say, “There are things I am not telling you.”

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For awhile, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

Adrienne Rich. Adrienne Rich - On Lies, Secrets, and Silence_ Selected Prose 1966-1978-W. W. Norton & Company (1995)