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What passages from a book have you never forgotten?

edited June 2014 in - Reading
Are there any passages you've never forgotten, that haunt you years after reading them? The following passage from Primo Levi's If This is a Man has been stuck in my mind since I first read it:

And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die. All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

Comments

  • Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

    His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

    Rereading, it seems more overblown than I remembered, but it stuck with me. Reminds me of my favourite lines from Kubla Khan 'And close your eyes with holy dread/For he on honey-dew has fed/And drunk the milk of paradise'.

  • The opening 10/15 pages of Dombey & Son by Charles Dickens (my favourite Dicken's novel) I was in a dark place when I started reading it and wow it helped me get totally lost in its pages for a few days - not going to stick it all down here but well worth checking out if you have a spare week or so lol.
  • The last paragraph of Cronin's Hatters Castle, ties in with the first pages of the book. A very good writer.
  • That's interesting, Pongo. It's something I often do in articles, and try to do in short stories - I've never been aware of it in a novel.
  • Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood when he talks about "snouting moles" and the "Bible black night" and two old people in bed "kippered".
  • ...and Mrs Ogmore Pritchard's Polar Sheets.


    2 words which say a lot about Mrs Pritchard!
  • ...lovely stuff Bill
  • I can remember the final lines of Harry Potter but I think that is because those books were my childhood and I am a big JK fan.

    "The scar had not pained Harry in nineteen years. All was well."

    A scene in An Abundance of Katherines by John Green springs to mind. If you have not read the books you might want to scroll past my comment as it is a big spoiler.

    "Oh, nothing. Thinking out loud."
    "That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."
    "The people who've been in your secret hiding places."
    "The people you bite your thumb in front of."
    "..."
    "..."
    "Wow. My first Lindsey."
    "My second Colin."
    "That was fun. Let's try it again."
    "Sold."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."
    "..."

    There are two amazing lines in The Fault in Our Stars also by John Green.

    "“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

    “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”



    I can't name any other passages from the top of my head but I can remember favourite parts of books because of plot twists or character deaths.
  • Some of those quotes are lovely, St Force - thanks for posting them.
    I particularly like: "That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."
    "The people who've been in your secret hiding places."
  • edited June 2014
    'But love is a durable fire,
    in the mind burning;
    never sick, never old, never dead,
    never from itself turning.'

    Sir Walter Raleigh
    might be a fragment of 'A Lover's Complaint'
    Publisher; Penguin Books
    Editor; John Hayward
    Title; The Penguin Book of English Verse p.38

    The verse actually reads;
    Butt Love is a durable fyre
    In the mynde burnynge:
    Never syke nver ould never dead
    from itt selfe never turnynge.


  • He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.
    How gorgeous is that line?
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