Passages that give you literary pleasure

[buff daddy]

This passage is from the novel of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I know, Star Wars, but I found this pretty chilling when I first read it. (Anakin Skywalker has just killed his wife and revcieved the lava burns, he's now just been fitted into the Darth Vader suit:

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:

Stover makes this scene much better and have so much more gravitas than it did in the movie, where it came off as more comical than anything else with that silly "NOOOO!!!". He also did a great job of actually getting me to care about Anakin and Obi Wan, as well as making the two of them, along with Count Dooku, more interesting and have better motivations than anything that was in the film.

[First of My Name]

Stover makes this scene much better and have so much more gravitas than it did in the movie, where it came off as more comical than anything else with that silly "NOOOO!!!". He also did a great job of actually getting me to care about Anakin and Obi Wan, as well as making the two of them, along with Count Dooku, more interesting and have better motivations than anything that was in the film.

I agree. The book was a thousand times better than the movie.

[Liffguard]

I got goosebumps and chills down my spine when I read this passage from Richard K Morgan's Black Man:

Norton had no knowledge of the atiplano tongue beyond counting one to twenty and a handful of food items, but even through the blanket incomprehension, he felt a dry ice cold coming off the black man and what he was saying. The words husked out of him, rustling and intent, like something reptilian breaking out of an egg. In the fog of sleeplessness that was gradually shutting down his senses, Norton had one moment of clarity so supreme he knew it had to be a lie; but in that moment it was as if something else was speaking through Marsalis, something ancient and not really human using his mouth and face as a mask and a launch point to hurl itself across the gulf between worlds, to reach out and take Franklin Gutierrez by the throat and heart, as if he was sitting on the other side of a desk and not a quarter of a billion kilometers of empty space.

Also I absolutely love the final short passage from F X Toole's Rope Burns:

With his shoes in his hands but without his soul, he moved quietly down the rear stairs and was gone, his eyes as dry as a burning leaf.

[King Kev.]

"It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The first part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been horses stabled in the barn they would have stamped and champed and broken it to pieces. If there had been a crowd of guests, even a handful of guests bedded down for the night, their restless breathing and mingled snores would have gently thawed the silence like a warm spring wind. If there had been music ... but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Inside the Waystone a man huddled in his deep, sweet-smelling bed. Motionless, waiting for sleep, he lay wide-eyed in the dark. In doing this he added a small, frightened silence to the larger, hollow one. They made an alloy of sorts, a harmony.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the thick stone walls of the empty taproom and in the flat, grey metal of the sword that hung behind the bar. It was in the dim candlelight that filled an upstairs room with dancing shadows. It was in the mad pattern of a crumpled memoir that lay fallen and unforgotten atop the desk. And it was in the hands of the man who sat there, pointedly ignoring the pages he had written and discarded long ago.

The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the weary calm that comes from knowing many things.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die."

[Darth Richard]

Uh oh.

[Mosi Wanostracht]

Once more he climbed on the earth pile. Then he stopped. Vervain and Thistle, raising ther heads to peer past him from behind, saw why. Thlayli had made his way up the run and was crouched immediately below. Blood had matted the great thatch of fur on hs head and one ear, half-severed, hung down beside his face. His breathing was slow and heavy.

"You'll find it much harder to push me back from here, General," he said.

With a sort of weary, dull surprise, Woundwort realized he was afraid. He did not want to attack Thlayli agan. He knew, with flinching certainty, that he was not up to it. And who was? he thought. Who could do it? No, they would have to get in by some other way and everyone would know why.

"Thlayli," he said, "we've unblocked a run out here. I can bring in enough rabbits to pull down this wall in four places. Why don't you come out?"

"Thlayli's reply, when it came, was low and gasping, but perfectly clear.

"My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here."

"His Chief Rabbit?" said Vervain, staring.

It had never occurred to Woundwort or any of his officers that Thlayli was not the Chief Rabbit of his warren. Yet what he said carried immediate conviction. He was speaking the truth. And if he was not the Chief Rabbit, then somewhere close by there must be another, stronger rabbit who was, A stronger rabbit than Thlayli. Where was he? What was he doing at this moment?

Watership Down, Richard Adams

[Luthien Targaryen]

:agree: Stover does write a better Star Wars movie than George Lucas... Also good call on Watership Down, one of my favourite "young adult" books before there were such things.

From "Morgoth's Ring" part of the "History of Middle Earth" series, which are basically stuff Tolkien wrote that he rejected, or were part of the bigger backstory of his work. This is sort of like a DVD extra for The Silmarillion (i live in hope of a GOT style TV series....but with a whole lot less sexy bits). Finrod, an Elf is having a philosophical conversation with Andreth, a mortal woman who he knows has feelings for his brother, Aegnor. Aegnor returned her love but they could never be together because of the difference in their lives.

"Darkness fell in the room. He took her hand in the light of the fire. "whither go you?" she said

"North away" he said: "to the swords, and the siege, and the walls of defence-that yet a while in Beleriand rivers may run clean, leaves spring, and the birds build their nests, ere Night comes."

"Will he be there, bright and tall, and the wind in his hair? Tell him. Tell him not to be reckless. Not to seek danger beyond need!"

"I will tell him" said Finrod. "But I might as well tell thee not to weep. He is a warrior, Andreth, and a spirit of wrath. In every stroke that he deals he sees the Enemy who long ago did thee this hurt. But you are not for Arda. Whither you go may you find light. Await us there, my brother--and me."

[Luthien Targaryen]

Another couple, this time Neil Gaiman, from The Sandman...

Morpheus: You should have gone to her funeral"

Orpheus : Why?

Morpheus: To say goodbye

Orpheus: I have not yet said goodbye to Eurydice

Morpheus: You should. You are mortal: It is the mortal way. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

An accurate description for anybody who's lost anybody close to them. I could follow this with the best eulogy at the best funeral in graphic literature....

"He respected my people. We respected him. We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that however, I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone and I am old."

[Liffguard]

The final page of Mike Carey's Lucifer series:

On into the void he flies, unafraid. There is nothing in mere absence that might cow him, or loneliness, or the lack of maps or charts. He is his own path and he sees by his own light. We watch him from a great distance, from a vantage point no less subjective, no less absolute, and so it is hard to tell if he imposes himself upon the emptiness or becomes it.

Or from an earlier issue:

If mercy is your aim, be relentless in your mercy. Be absolute. Be yourself until you bleed.

[TheLordHumongous]

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

The Body, Stephen King

I was in my pj’s and had one knee on the bed when I realised, almost calmly, that I was about to fall apart. I also realised I couldn’t do this in my bed when Gavin was there. I went back out towards the sitting room but only got halfway when I started trembling and sobbing and hugging myself. I leaned against the wall then slid down until I was on the floor. It seemed like something outside me had taken control. It shook through me like I was a washing machine. I knew what it was of course. The image of Shannon, lying there naked and tied up, her blood, the death that I saw in her eyes: where was I supposed to put that? What was I supposed to do with it? In what part of my body was I supposed to store it? Please tell me. Because whichever part it was, I knew that part was full. It had been full for some time. Since the death of my parents in fact. I had my arms around my knees and I was shaking so hard that it hurt my teeth, as I tried to find a place for all this horror.

Gradually Shannon’s blood gave way to my parents’ blood, her damaged body made room for my parents’ terrible wounds. The enormity of what had happened hit me at last. Sitting there on the corridor floor in the house where my mother died, I howled for my mother and father, howled like a dog, gasping for air between the howls. At the same time crazy torn-up pictures of our lives seemed to blow down the corridor towards me, as though someone had literally pulled out thousands of photos from the family albums and confettied them, so that all I saw were my mother’s gloves tied to her stocks when we were waiting to go skiing, my father’s moustache when he grew one for a few months, the scar on my mother’s wrist that she wouldn’t talk about –and now I would never know its origin and I would never see it again – her amused expression when my Stratton grandmother commented on the new curtains: ‘Do you think this style will last?’ The little black dress my mother wore to the opening of the grandstand at the racecourse, my father’s pencil stub writing down the golf scores, his laugh, her fine fingers, his grunts when he was absorbed in a job and I was asking questions, her big brown nipples that she didn’t like but I loved, his long soft penis and its curious head, her pubic hair so dark and mysterious, his pubic hair so thick and curly, him planting a kiss on the new tractor while I, at the age of eight, took a photo, her laughing and saying, ‘So you’d like me better if I had four wheels and a power take-off?’, him saying, ‘I’ll show you a power take-off,’ and grabbing her and them kissing kissing kissing, passionately, as I ran around them laughing and squealing and grabbing at them, the two of them kissing, hugging, and the love between them, the love the love, always the love, the wild beautiful love that somehow survived the fights and the stresses and strains and worst of all the monotony of everyday life and I understood then what it means for a human life to end prematurely and arbitrarily, how each human being is an accumulation of wonderful and unique details, and in destroying a human being you destroy ‘all the thousand million memories’ as well as the bent little finger on his left hand and the stubble on her legs and the smile and the grimace and the frown and the way they use a spatula and the way they chop an onion at arm’s length or place the jumper leads on the car battery or hold a baby at the school fete while the mother has a go at the ‘Putt for Prizes’. ‘Does anyone really appreciate life while they have it?’ For a few moments there I think I became one of the philosophers and poets and infants and even Monets, a member of the exclusive club of those who do.

It seemed so unfair and lonely and cold as I lay there on the floor and realised after a while that no-one was going to come and get me, no-one was available to help me, no-one would put me to bed. The house was cooling fast – we couldn’t afford to have a heater on all night – and it always lost its temperature quickly.

So I put myself to bed, after a while, a long while, and I lay there feeling Gavin’s warmth and listening to his breathing. At the end of each breath I waited for the next one, scared that it might not come. ‘Please keep breathing, Gavin,’ I begged him, ‘please don’t stop. Keep reaching for that next breath, little one.’

I was thinking about my parents’ love. Where was it now? What happened to it? It had to be somewhere. A force as powerful as that doesn’t just disappear. Didn’t they teach us in science that matter can’t be destroyed? It only changes form. If that were true for an orange or a rock or a Falcon ute, surely it had to be true for the bond that my father and mother had. Maybe that’s what bound this house together, kept the farm going, caused Gavin and me to be lying here together tonight. As I drifted into sleep I imagined I could feel it whispering down the corridor, slipping in and out of the rooms, circling the bed and finally holding us both safe in its arms.

John Marsden, While I Live

The journey took an instant that would have taken mere light three hundred million years, but Death travels inside that space where Time has no meaning. Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

There was company on the ride - galaxies, stars, ribbons of shining matter, streaming and eventually spiralling towards the distant goal.

Death on his pale horse moved down the darkness like a bubble on a river.

And every river flows somewhere.

And then, below, a plain. Distance was as meaningless here as time. But there was a sense of hugeness. The plain could have been a mile away, or a million miles; it was marked by long valleys or rills which flowed away to either side as he got closer.

And landed.

He dismounted, and stood in the silence. Then he went down on one knee.

Change the perspective. The furrowed landscape falls away into immense distances, curves at the edges, becomes a fingertip.

Azrael raised his finger to a face that filled the sky, lit by the faint glow of dying galaxies.

There are a billion Deaths, but they are all aspects of the one Death: Azrael, the Great Attractor, the Death of Universes, the beginning and end of time.

Most of the universe is made up of dark matter, and only Azrael knows who it is.

Eyes so big that a supernova would be a mere suggestion of a gleam on the iris turned slowly and focused on the tiny figure on the immense whorled plains of his fingertips. Beside Azrael the big Clock hung in the centre of the entire web of the dimensions, and ticked onward. Stars glittered in Azrael's eyes.

The Death of the Discworld stood up.

LORD, I ASK FOR –

Three of the servants of oblivion slid into existence alongside him.

One said, Do not listen. He stands accused of meddling.

One said, And morticide.

One said, And pride. And living with intent to survive.

One said, And Siding with chaos against good order.

Azrael raised an eyebrow.

The servants drifted away from Death, expectantly.

LORD, WE KNOW THERE IS NO GOOD ORDER EXCEPT THAT WHICH WE CREATE...

Azrael’s expression did not change.

THERE IS NO HOPE BUT US. THERE IS NO MERCY BUT US. THERE IS NO JUSTICE. THERE IS JUST US.

The dark, sad face filled the sky

ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION.

AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END ONE DAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.

Death took a step backwards.

It was impossible to read expression in Azrael’s features.

Death glanced sideways at the servants.

LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?

He waited.

LORD? Said Death

In the time it took to answers, several galaxies unfolded, whirled around Azrael like paper streamers, impacted, and were gone.

The Azrael said:

YES.

And another finger reached out across the darkness towards the Clock.

There were faint screams of rage from the servants, and then screams of realisation, and then three brief, blue flames.

All other clocks, even the handless clock of Death, were reflections of the Clock. Exactly reflections of the Clock; they told the universe what the time was, but the Clock told Time what time is. It was the mainspring from which all time poured.

And the design d the Clock was this: that the biggest hand only went around once.

The second hand whirred along a circular path that even light would take days to travel, forever chased by the minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries and ages. But the Universe hand went around once.

At least, until someone wound up the clockwork.

And Death returned home with a handful of Time.

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the doom written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law’s response: “Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ’em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

[Lord Tyrion's Whore]

The entirety of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita does this for me. It has to be the most well written english novel by a man for whom english was not a first language.

Lots of people quote the opening passage as one of the best, but one of my favorites comes much later, when Humbert sees how Delores sees them.

She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible -- and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary -- fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.

Then there's Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, which enraptures me in a very different, totally twisted way.

This very famous routine is one of my favorites.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”

“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”

After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”

After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

[Sci-2]

eta: Love the Cloud Atlas excerpt

Lolita is a good choice, as is Nabakov!

=-=-=

It was almost midnight when he left the table and sat down to the piano with a cigar. She went to the window and walked out into the glittering night. The city was already sleeping, and the heavens took up the sound of the creatures below, the stars making a notation of their trills and bells that rang in the darkness like glass. Whispers of Satie joined them from the room, and there seemed, in this inimitable moment, to be an agreement between time and the proximity of all things, as if clumsy humans might have a place in all this infinite, perfect darkness, if only they played at the edge. Out of sight, blindfolded, and in agreement.

Catling, B. (2013-01-08). The Vorrh (p. 126). Honest Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[The Killer Snark]

Lolita is an absolutely gorgeous book. Both novels by the little known Polish pre magic-realist genius Bruno Schulz work in their enttirety for me as well: sheer poetry, even in translation. His work should be better known.

[Pinkie Baelish]

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.

Oh my god, yes. I had lots of fun analyzing TGOST for my A Levels. Books like these are just begging to have essays written about them.

[First of My Name]

Hey who changed the thread name? Literary "pleasure" is just not the same, almost every novel gives me some form of pleasure.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

In terms of genre, Tolkien gets me in a few places. From the Silmarillion, the last stand of the men of Dor-Lomin, with Hurin as the last one left screaming "Dawn will come again!" with each sweep. In LOTR, it's the arrival of the Rohirrim at Minas Tirith:

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

There's also a short passage in Zelazny's Courts of Chaos where Corwin responds to a nihilistic raven trying to convince him of the futility of trying to prevent doom. It's not that's moving, but the concept has stuck with me. It begins....

I have had a long life, Hugi. You insult me by assuming I have never considered these footnotes to sophomore philosophy....

And Corwin then eviscerates nihilism by essentially pointing out that advocates of nihilism are essentially destroying their own premise by caring enough to argue about it. But the "footnotes to sophomore philosophy" line is a good one to keep in mind in many internet debates.

There's another Zelazny line in Lord of Light where Mahasamatman (or just "Sam"), makes a statement to the effect that when you are strong, you can make your opposition quickly, but when you are weak and outnumbered, your opposition must be spread over greater time. Said it better than I just did, obviously, but it was a hopeful statement in that weakness does not mean you cannot win. It just means it is going to take longer, and you must be more determine.

Outside of genre, the last lines of Gunga Din:

Though I beat you and flayed you,

By the Living God that made you

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Gets me in the movie every time.

[Darth Richard]

Yeah, topic change name seems weird, considering the, uh, somewhat uncensored nature of the posts here.

For example, on most forums I couldn't do this:

FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK! YAY! FUCK!

[Sci-2]

“My dear Goodman Mather, there is not a demon in Hell who was not once something quite other, and more interesting. In the land where the Euphrates runs green and sweet, I was a grain-god with the head of a bull. In the rough valley of the Tyne I was a god of fertility and war, with the head of a crow. I was a fish-headed lord of plenty in the depths of the Tigris. Before language I was she-who-makes-the-harvest-come, and I rode a red boar. The earth answers when I call it by name. I know its name because we are family.”

-The Bread We Eat in Dreams

The ending - which I won't spoil - is also incredibly powerful, I rank this as one of the best shorts I've ever read.

eta: Good Tolkien choices FLOW. I think the coming of dawn is one of the most memorable passages in fantasy literature.

[First of My Name]

Here's another one from the book Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. This book is divided into three parts, and at the start of each one a part of this passage is recounted:

The dark is generous.

Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from the truths of others.

The dark protects us from what we dare not know.

Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night's embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in the day's harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it's the day that is temporary.

Day is the illusion.

Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

The dark is generous, and it is patient.

It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.

The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.

The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.

The dark's patience is infinite.

Eventually, even stars burn out.

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.

It always wins because it is everywhere.

It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle.

Love can ignite the stars.

[Lord Tyrion's Whore]

Lolita is an absolutely gorgeous book.

That entire novel is one long passage that gives me literary pleasure. However, my favorite by Nabokov is Pale Fire. Its almost just as beautifully written, and its dark and twisted sense of humor is delightful. Here's that book's take on the best form of suicide:

"Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump, but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord."