Passages that give you literary pleasure

[Theda Baratheon]

‘What big teeth you have!’

She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest’s

Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered:

‘All the better to eat you with.’

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the

face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded

clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set

up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed.

Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.

She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps

she will put die lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage

marriage ceremony.

The blizzard will die down.

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind

woman had thrown a sheet over them, the 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, 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.

Angela Carter, The Company of Wolves

[Gramsci]

I wouldn't say it gives me "pleasure", because it is somewhat tragic, but it sure does make my hair stand up:

“– But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?

– Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.

– Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?”

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Berlioz's death in Master and Margarita is one of those scenes in literature where you want to laugh, but you feel almost villainous for doing so. I like to think that is what Bulgakov was aiming for.

[onenagu]

'survival is the name of the game, william. the scruffiest hippy is my messenger ...do not expect radiant messengers of light. expect the flawed, the maimed in body and spirit. its all a film run backward...the atomic bomb through the manhatten project to the formula E=MC2'

[Mornie]

It is one of the passages I like most of all.

Now... tell me . .

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?

'Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?'

NO.

'Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact.'

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

She turned on him.

'It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!'

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

'Really? Then what would have happened, pray?'

A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

They walked in silence for a moment.

'Ah,' said Susan dully. 'Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that.'

I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.

'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.'

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little...'

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

'So we can believe the big ones?'

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

'They're not the same at all!'

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET... Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather.

[Sci-2]

"I think I must have nearly fallen asleep, when suddenly my flesh sparked and shivered, and a thing began to coalesce out of the hematite air. I could not, at first, see anything at all but a length of deeper black amid the blackness. Its edges seemed to shimmer with light, a heat lightning crisping the edges of a shape, glowing like an afterimage. I was afraid, granddaughter, of course I was afraid. I cowered into the curve of the cavern, shaking like a newborn fawn.

At length I perceived a long head and flowing hair, luminous eyes round as moons. It seemed a part of the stone, a part of the night, a part of nothing I had ever come near to knowing. My eyes rolled in my head and sweat slicked my skin. My heart beat so fast I felt as though I had swallowed a hummingbird.

Finally, the outlines of the shape, rimmed in white fire, became clear and distinct.

In a moment it was utterly familiar to me, the long curve of black neck, the smooth haunches and velvet fur, a thick tail in a hundred braids brushing the cave floor, breath puffing from her great nostrils like pipe smoke: a horse beyond fantasies of horses, beyond any guess at size or hope of beauty, her ears seeming to brush the ceiling like stiff feathers, their twitchings carving some arcane verse on the rock. Scattered around her hooves lay charred jawbones and shoulder blades, and sternums like scepters.

The Mare watched me calmly, snorting occasionally and blinking her incandescent eyes. There was no sound for a space that seemed like a thousand winters joined at the snowline.

I still could not say where the courage came from, from what hidden place in me it sprung up and gurgled brightly, but I stood on clamoring legs and reached out my little hand to the creature, avoiding the rattling bones in their protective ring. I stroked her nose and the sides of her lightless face— and granddaughter, I cannot even now describe the softness of her flesh, the gentle glide of my hand over her thick, gleaming fur. Her skin was the texture of new cream, the shade of a crow flying high in a moonless night. She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure. Her eyes wheeled like suns and her great heart thundered against me. I buried my face in her mane and breathed the scent of wild earth and a burning sky. There was no other world but her."

-C.Valente, In the Night Garden

[Francis Buck]

It is one of the passages I like most of all.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather.

That's pretty awesome. I've never read any Pratchett, that might convince me to do so.

[Toshio.Keepiru]

The entire chapter Lord Mhoram's Victory from The Power that Preserves by Stephen R. Donaldson

I end up reading a few times a year. It's fantastic and deserves to be reread.

[maarsen]

" He walked out into the jagged brilliance of the morning."

Roger Zelazny from Lord of Light. and if I screwed up the quote, I lost my copy 20 odd years ago. Still gives me a feeling of awe.

[The Killer Snark]

One of my favourite sci-fi novels of all time.

[First of My Name]

I'm currently reading Matthew Stover's Blade of Tyshalle, and every chapter opens with an awesome passage like this one, comparing the characters to some sort of mythical figures:

And each had his own role to play: the crooked knight defended the part-time goddess; the part-time goddess served the land; the acolytes of dust and ashes fed their master's hunger.

The dark angel made war.
He answered the call of the crooked knight; he used the part-time goddess to work his will; he named the god of dust and ashes his enemy.
On that day, the dark angel broke his chains and went forth to battle.

I love this stuff.. Each of these is symbolic for a character in the story, but I haven't figured out who for all of them.

[The Killer Snark]

Odd as it may seem, great struggles such as the one you can see emerging from my journals are not always visible to the participants. Much depends on what people dream in the secrecy of their hearts. I have always been as concerned with the shaping of dreams as with the shaping of actions. Between the lines of my journals is the struggle with humankind's view of itself — a sweaty contest on a field where motives from our darkest past can well up out of an unconscious reservoir and become events with which we not only must live but contend. It is the hydra-headed monster which always attacks from your blind side. I pray, therefore, that when you have traversed my portion of the Golden Path you no longer will be innocent children dancing to music you cannot hear.

........

You must remember that I have at my internal demand every expertise known to our history. This is the fund of energy I draw upon when I address the mentality of war. If you have not heard the moaning cries of the wounded and dying, you do not know about war. I have heard those cries in such numbers that they haunt me. I have cried out myself in the aftermath of battle. I have suffered wounds in every epoch-wounds from fist and club and rock, from shell-studded limb and bronze sword, from the mace and the cannon, from arrows and lasguns and the silent smothering of atomic dust, from biological invasions which blacken the tongue and drown the lungs, from the swift gush of flame and the silent working of slow poisons. . . and more I will not recount! I have seen and felt them all. To those who dare ask why I behave as I do, I say: With my memories, I can do nothing else. I am not a coward and once I was human.

........

It is all around you — the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group… each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to "those better times." I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles.

Some gems from Leto II Atreides, God Emperor of Dune

[Sci-2]

'I remember coming into one meeting with the Manager, holding the beetle I had just created in my office. It was emerald, long as a hand, but narrow, flexible. It had slender antennae that curled into azure blue sensors on the ends, its shining carapace subdivided in twelve exact places. The beetle would have fit perfectly in a school child's ear and clicked and hummed its knowledge into them.

But Scarskirt and Leer had created a similar beetle.

My Manager immediately thought it was my fault, and erupted into flame.

Leer stared at Scarskirt, who was staring at the metallic table top. “I thought we talked to you about this,” Leer said to me, still looking at Scarskirt.

“No, you didn't,” I said, but the moment belonged to them.

My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste, and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-​swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world.

After this initial communication problem, the situation worsened.'
-Jeff Vandermeer, 'The Situation', from his collection The Third Bear

[Sci-2]

Another one from my list of passages:

"She glances at the window, but can’t see out of it. Its milky opacity is thick with ice flowers. No matter, the variegated landscape is a mantel of snow striped with tree trunks. There is no sky or earth now, only a whirling cloak of snow.

Her lungs are coated with tiny flakes of ice. She coughs and takes the red stone calumet, puts in the tobacco and tips a brand of cedar into it and blows smoke in four directions. Her heart, which was heavy, begins to lighten.

She closes her inner eyes slowly. The sounds of the room tempt and torture her. The dripping IV is a dangerous symphony of minimalist brilliance. The shoes of the thistle people tick like clock dials in the empty waiting room between worlds.

Her Granddaughter brings in a smell of woodsmoke, and fire. 'Gramma. You can’t walk the dead here. They think you are in a coma. You have to come down our road, Gramma. I know you hear me.' "
-The Stone Badger

eta:

Pigging down fistfulls of cashews from a birdbath, a pair of idiots in grimy tweed suits are playing a weltspiel (world-game) on a stone table; each pair of tiles removed from the board is a pair of lovers who will never meet: the goal of the game is to remove them all.

An evil image... an Edwardian parlour... noon... light slants in acutely... There is — this is not one of my dreams, is it? It feels like memory, but I have no such memories — there is an upright piano in the middle of the room... a voluptuous, woozy woman in a very sheer dress leans over the back of it while a small boy practices at the keys... from time to time she takes a candy from a dish and pops it gracefully into his red mouth...

I am red mouth light crick in neck being dragged by the collar, I am awake — the sewerman has me by the collar and is pulling me through the door — I stumble and grope for words to complain. I see stars and bare branches. We are going to a stone outbuilding

I don’t recognize — I still dream. On a stone table the Prosthetic Libido is lying in a box packed with cashews. Glancing into the arch of the ribcage a balmy summer day, milky haze over the grass, already with thee, tender is the night...

Cisco, Michael (2011-04-14). The Great Lover (Kindle Locations 1115-1125). Chomu Press. Kindle Edition.

[First of My Name]

There is a cycle of tales that begins long, long ago, when the human gods decreed that all their mortal children shall know sorrow, loss and defeat in the course of the lives they were given. Lives of pure joy, of perfect sufficiency and constant victory, the gods reserved for themselves.
Now it came to pass that one particular man had run nearly hisentire alloted span, and he had never known defeat. Sorrows he had, losses he had taken, but reversals that other men would call defeats were to him no more than obstacles; even the worst of his routs was, to him, merely a stratgic withdrawal. He could be killed, but never conquered. For him, the only defeat was surrender; and he would never surrender.
And so it soon followed that the king ofthe human gods undertook to teach this particular man the meaning of defeat.
The king of the gods took away this man's career - took away his gift for the art that he loved and that had made him famous - and this particular man did not surrender.
The king of the gods took away this man's possessions - took away his home, his wealth, and the respect of his people - and still this particular man did not surrender.
The king of the gods took away this man's family, everyone that he loved - and still this particular man did not surrender.
In the final story of this cycle, the king of the gods takes away this man's self-respect, to teach him the meaning of the helplessness that goes with defeat.
And in the end - the common end, for all who contend with gods - this particular man surrenders, and dies.

-Blade of Tyshalle

[dietl]

Reaching behind me, I found the Brie and broke off a fragment, sucking her nipple through it. She tasted almost as she had the day I took the drop of milk on my finger.

Manon smiled when she realised what I was doing.

You know the peasant saying? If you can't imagine how neighbouring vineyards can produce such different wines put one finger in your woman's quim and another up her arse, then taste both and stop asking stupid questions… My fingers found both vineyards. At the front, she tasted salt as anchovy and as delicious. At the rear, bitter like chocolate and smelling strangely of tobacco.

This wonderful passage by the gifted author Jonathan Grimwood reminds me of my holidays in France ten years ago...

[Talleyrand]

Croup: If you cut us, do we not bleed?

Vandemar: ...No.

&

Croup:Unprofessional? Us? Sir. Might I with due respect remind you that Mister Vandemar and myself burned down the City of Troy? We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth century Tuscany. We are utterly professional.

From Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere - I think they're replaying the radio version that had James McAvoy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Anthony Head and Christopher Lee on Christmas - I'll definitely be listening

[JMHthe3rd]

So many choices, but here's some haunting passages from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

"That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream."

And:

"The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be."

And:

"Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?"

And my favorite:

"And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked and dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he will never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

Judge Holden is awesome. This stuff gives me goosebumps. And I really need to read more of McCarthy's work.

[Theda Baratheon]

''You! You have no business with the dead nor do the God's above! This is violence you have caused upon the heavens, and so they come for you, the dark destroyers late but true to the mark, now lie in wait for you''

This is from memory, and is possible different in different translations, but I always remembered Tiresias' speech to Creon in Antigone

[Sci-2]

Woman. Everything I am I owe to Her. All the good and the bad in my
life. All the sorcery and mystery. All the wisdom and madness. Even in
the very beginning, before there could be space, or time either, when
every point of each of us touched every point of each of the others,
She was there. She was Herself the one point out of which everything
has come. And She was the coming, too. Why do you think we left but to
follow Her ?

"In the very, very beginning, before there was a beginning, when
everything was one point, Woman was all the incomprehensible meaning we
needed. She held us together. She made us one. Wholly promiscuous, for
we were all together with Her - yet wholly chaste, for She was as
utterly alone as we were - one whole and single point. What greater
happiness could there be ?

"That was the question that doomed us. That we could think it at all
bespeaks a terrible flaw in an otherwise perfect wholeness. But, of
course, it was our perfection that inspired the question in the first
place. How much happier could we be if we were to be a part of Her yet
apart from Her ? How much more happiness would there be if we could see
Her and be seen ?

"And with that question came the necessity for the space to see and the
time in which to be seen, the space a hug needs, the time a kiss
requires, a space and a time vast enough to embrace all the mystery of
Her and equally ample enough to make room for all of us that wanted to
see and hold Her.

"There were many more of us than any of us could have imagined. Each of
us had thought we were the one and only one until we fell apart. Our
clamoring for Her drove Her away from us - and naturally we followed,
out into space and into time, wanting to be with Her as we have always
been with Her. But in a new way. And so space and time came into being.
Only none of us, except perhaps for Her, could have known how cold and
dark it was going to be.

"And none of us, surely not even She, could have anticipated the woe
that was to follow - and the joy that woe would require to make itself
whole again. And none suspected the sorcery and wisdom that we would
have to learn and possess to match the mystery and madness of losing
Her. Nor did we realize the vast distances, the expanding light-years
of space and what great aeonian spans of time it would take even to
begin to approximate the generous and true wholeness we had enjoyed
when we were all at one point.

"Little did any of us foresee our bizarre fate. How strange that, out
here in space and time, each of us is so wholly separate from others.
How strange that She is everywhere and yet nowhere. How much stranger
yet that She has become woman - and out of woman´s diminishment, out of
the exile from the body of the ovaries to become testicles, out of the
stunting of her nourishing breasts to useless nipples, out of the
maiming of the fullness and symmetry of her chromosomes to a genetic
mutation has come the distortion that is man.

"Is there any wonder then that we men suffer and in our suffering we
rage ? We are the immortal points that broke apart from the one point
to follow Her here. We are the eternal wanderers. And where is She now
? She is everywhere and nowhere. She is the embrace of the great
emptiness that is the universe. She is the long-lingering kiss of time.
She is everything She always was - and everything we always wanted Her
to be. Now we serve Her or we rail against Her, because we can never
escape Her or ever really find Her. She is nameless and She is the very
breath of all names - for She is the truth that finally embraces us
all. She is God."
--Attanasio, The Dragon and the Unicorn

[Sci-2]

"Your attempts to define the transcendent are as hopeless as a dreaming man’s attempt to define his physical body as an entity within his dream. Alas, the body is outside the dream and cannot be thought of in terms of the circumstances of the dream! In the same way, that which is transcendent and eternal in you escapes the references and categories of your conceptual reality and cannot be conceived as a construct within it. Yet your life is itself a dream. The problem is that you got it the wrong way around: the dream is not in the body; it is the body that is in the dream. All metaphors, all cartoons of explanation and closure, exist only in the dream. When you sleep, you partially awake.

But ‘Who is It who dreams?’ I hear you ask.

This question is itself a reflection of your myopia; your infantile need to conceive of everything as being produced by something else. You see, the Dreamer is Itself the dream. The dream is the eternal unfolding and expression of the Dreamer to Itself. And it encompasses countless, perhaps unending viewpoints within it; viewpoints which the Dreamer assumes, and which entail amnesia from all other perspectives. Yes, every realm in the unfathomable dream of existence rests on layers upon layers of amnesia. Without identifying with a viewpoint, and forgetting who you really are, you could not taste from the many cups of experience. What finality or limitation could you know were it not for your forgetfulness? What weight could your actions carry? What significance could your achievements or failures hold? Rejoice in your ability to forget, for it endows you with the colors of life. But bear this in mind: you will once again remember. And when you do, you will again be home. In the interim, live out your myths – imaginatively."
-Kastrup, Bernard - The Formless Speaks