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Passages that give you literary pleasure


First of My Name

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The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.

Childhood tiptoed out.

Silence slid in like a bolt.

Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared.

From The God of Small things by Arundhati Roy. The whole book is a literary orgasm, but this stuck with me.

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Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

The Lady of the House of Love, a short story from The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

just beautiful. The whole of The Bloody Chamber is full of magic, and longing and melancholy and wonder.

i wouldnt go as far as to say ''literary orgasm'' but it's a really wonderful piece of writing.

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Nice timing -> check out the erotica thread, particularly the part about "Hysterical Literature".

I don't get the feeling from reading a lot of Shakespeare, but some passages when performed well are incredible. Love a good delivery of the slings and arrows speech.

Some passages by Vandermeer are Valente are gorgeous. Vandermeer's short story Secret Life is a pure joy to reread again and again.

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Well evil chicken obviously.

Seconding Angela Carter.

The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; she would follow with her finger the elegant structure of her rib-cage, where the heart fluttered under the flesh like a bird under a blanket, and she would draw down the long line from breast-bone to navel (which was a mysterious cavern or grotto), and she would rasp her palms against her bud-wing shoulderblades. And then she would writhe about, clasping herself, laughing, sometimes doing cartwheels and handstands out of sheer exhilaration at the supple surprise of herself now she was no longer a little girl.

Also, no thread of this nature is complete without the opening passage from Daniel Woodrells Winter's Bone.

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

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Gears of the City by Felix Gilman had some passages that were absolutely beautiful. Rarely does a book make me break out the highlighter but this one surely did. Seconding Vandermeer and Valente, as well.

This. Although I don't know if literary orgasm is the right word. Some of the passages when he's down in the basement near the beginning with that thing. Scared the shit out of me.

Hmm, St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare.

Mark Lawrence has a beautiful passage in King of Thorns when Jorg is talking about mountain climbing and remembering the tune of a piano piece his mom played. I should dig that up.

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after being beaten bloody, one of the Spartiates in Gates of Fire:

This is my shield. I bear it before me into battle, but it is not mine alone. It protects my brother on my left, it protects my city. I will never let my brother out of its shadow nor my city out of its shelter. I will die with my shield before me, facing my enemy!"

- the last line being shouted. I can't remember exactly how it was put, since this is from memory

There are also quite a few from the Iliad, but that probably counts as poetry anyway, so maybe it doesn't count...

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Sansa's snow castle in the Eyrie is one of the most beautiful passages I've ever read.

Sansa eased open the door, and made her way down the winding stair. When she opened the door to the garden, it was so lovely that she held her breath, unwilling to disturb such perfect beauty. The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. All color had fled the world outside. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here.

Yet she stepped out all the same. Her boots tore ankle-deep holes into the smooth white surface of the snow, yet made no sound. Sansa drifted past frosted shrubs and thin dark trees, and wondered if she were still dreaming. Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover's kisses, and melted on her cheeks. At the center of the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes. She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell. The taste of innocence. The taste of dreams.

When Sansa opened her eyes again, she was on her knees. She did not remember falling. It seemed to her that the sky was a lighter shade of grey. Dawn, she thought. Another day. Another new day. It was the old days she hungered for. Prayed for. But who could she pray to? The garden had been meant for a godswood once, she knew, but the soil was too thin and stony for a weirwood to take root. A godswood without gods, as empty as me.

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A quote from Steven Erikson in the Deadhouse Gates. This part still gives me chills when I read it.

“The unnamed soldier is a gift. The named soldier - dead, melted wax - demands a response among the living... a response no-one can make.

Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous - as if cursed - while the dead are revered?

Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?

Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives.

Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living. ”

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This. Although I don't know if literary orgasm is the right word. Some of the passages when he's down in the basement near the beginning with that thing. Scared the shit out of me.

Hmm, St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare.

Mark Lawrence has a beautiful passage in King of Thorns when Jorg is talking about mountain climbing and remembering the tune of a piano piece his mom played. I should dig that up.

I didn't read this thread expecting to see my name, but thanks!

I love this section in Freefall by William Golding:

My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. There are twenty modes of change, filter and translation between us.

[...]

Deep calls out to deep. Our communion (communication) must of needs be imperfect for we are fallen creatures, yet we must of needs make the effort.

[...]

I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place. I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself onto white paper. The rivets join us together and yet, for all the passion, we share nothing but our sense of division.

And that’s the business of writing right there. Whether you’re writing great things about the human condition or spinning out dark little tales to provide momentary distraction. Either way, a rich and vivid inner world wrapped in ideas and plot has got to find its way out of the writer’s head through the medium of these few dozen symbols on the keyboard and into the reader’s mind. It’s a trick that makes the rich man’s getting through the eye of that needle look easy

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''The thin muslin went flaring up the chimney like a magic bird and now off came her skirt, her woolen stockings, her shoes, and on to the fire they went, too, too and were gone for good. The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh. This dazzling, naked she combed out her hair with her fingers; her hair looked white as the snow outside. Then went directly to the man with red eyes in whose unkempt mane the lice moved; she stood up on tiptoe and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt.''

////

///

''The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, and upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.

All silent, all still.

Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves' birthday, and the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink through.

See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf. ''

The Company of Wolves

Seriously, Angela Carter's writing is one of my favourite things.

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Basically the whole prologue of Vellum by Hal Duncan. I don't have the book to hand, though.

Also a fair few pieces in the rest of it, he's a glorious stylist (the 'impact crater of a fallen angel' sequence springs to mind), but the prologue is wall-to-wall amazing.

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There are quite a few from The Silmarillion that are goose-bump-inducing.

For example -

"There was silence in Valinor, and no sound could be heard, save only from afar there came on the wind through the pass of the mountains the wailing of the Teleri like the cold cry of gulls. For it blew chill from the East in that hour, and the vast shadows of the sea were rolled against the walls of the shore"

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It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.

Odd to be so governed by an appetite.

It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine, and he liked her the way he liked chicken.

(from Jeanette Winterson's The Passion)

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I don't know if I'd call it a lit-gasm, but (seeing DA post here reminded me of it) the part in Leviathan Wakes where:

Miller goes to find Julie. The whole passage is incredibly atmospheric and moving.

Another in Justin Cronin's The Twelve:

When Kittridge tells the story about the Iraqi girl he was unable to save or comfort, and then the subsequent scene where he holds the little boy as the MOAB detonates since comfort is all he can offer. Incredibly emotional scene.

A lot from Bakker, but one in particular is the intro the The Darkness That Comes Before:

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

The citadel of Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had pulled down its mighty gates. Ishuäl was the secret refuge of the Kûniüric High Kings, and no one, not even the No-God, could besiege a secret.

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