I’m a big one for oohing and aahing over beautiful lines in books. Here are a few from books that had a big impact on me. What are yours?
In this not-quite darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather. –The closing line from Wallace Stegner’s awesomely beautiful, Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose, in which the narrator is wondering if he, unlike his grandfather, can forgive a wife’s indiscretion.
“Say she is well and happy, and sign it Edith Carr!” Gene Stratton Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost. Edith was a society chick who was supposed to marry someone who fell in love with our girl Elnora Comstock. Edith says this on Mackinac Island; the guy in question has had a nervous breakdown looking for Elnora, who’s safely on the island with friends thinking the situation out. Those eleven words are Edith’s white flag of surrender… and the beginning of Edith’s transformation.
“So well that I wish we might always pull in the same boat. Will you, Amy?” Laurie’s proposal, in Little Women, after Amy observes how well they row together. Even if you wanted Laurie and Jo to end up together, you have to love the scene and the line.
But a bird sang blithely on a budding bough, close by, the snowdrops blossomed freshly at the window, and the spring sunshine streamed in like a benediction over the placid face upon the pillow, a face so full of painless peace that those who loved it best smiled through their tears, and thanked God that Beth was well at last. –The morning after Beth March’s death in Little Women.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. –The opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which tells the whole story in one sentence.
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. –Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes; like Austen, this line sets up the entire book.
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Hi Mel,
I’m more of a paragraph and scene lover. Here are a few of my favorites:
“I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with the simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, page 41 (It’s impossible for me to pick out a favorite line from this book. Asking me to do that is like asking my to pick out my favorite grain of sand on Minot Beach in Scituate, Massachusetts.)
“. . . I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ — and tore it up. — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, pp 209- 210. (I got goosebumps just transcribing this scene, perhaps the greatest in American literature.)
One more, and then I need to go back to work:
“Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep. Pencey Prep is this school that’s in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. You probably heard of it. You’ve probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse’s picture, it always says: “Since 1888 we have been molding young boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.” Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking at all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.” — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, p. 2.
Great stuff, Frank!!