hey all, I was just wondering what you guys thought was the most eloquent and well written passage of all time.
"Scarlet O'hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were." Margaret Mitchell's opening sentence in Gone With The Wind It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Owell's 1984 opening sentence
"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die." H.P. Lovecraft "The Nameless City"
Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man — or is it a woman? — whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey’s paws so they reach out from below their own waists. From Iron Council, by China Miéville.
Eloquence comes in many forms, I guess. The first page or so of Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn is breathtakingly eloquent. There are perhaps dozens of passages in the King James bible one might cite.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!" George Orwell - 1984 These lines make me feel the world of Big Brother - a world of isolation, paranoia and desperation. When I first read them they made me feel so very cold.
"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." End of 100 years of Solitude. Because damn. "“Don’t you see? . . . The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open.” East of Eden. Just real poignant. ""But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." End of Farewell to Arms. Because damn. Just what comes to mind
