# Favorite lines—yours or someone else's



## Jon M (Aug 3, 2012)

Reboot of an older thread. Post favorite lines from your work or the work of a favorite author.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.William Gibson, _Neuromancer_​


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## Deleted member 49710 (Aug 3, 2012)

From Corneille, _Cinna_, lines 697-700:

oui, quand par son trépas je l'aurai méritée
je veux joindre à sa main ma main ensanglantée
l'épouser dans sa cendre [...]

yes, when by its crime I have earned her
I want to join her hand with my bloodied hand
marry her in its ashes
(translation mine)

I dug around for something non-French but this was the first thing that sprang to mind, so... voilà.


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## TinyDancer (Aug 3, 2012)

Tham dee, dai dee; tham chua, dai chua  
 do good, get good & do bad, get bad
 - a thai saying someone special used to say alot. 

and

Writing is flying in dreams. 
When you remember. When you can. When it works.
It's that easy. -Author's Notebook 92. Neil Gaiman 'Smokes and Mirrors'


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## Jon M (Aug 4, 2012)

"Are you kidding? They’re pumping Haldol by the quart.  It’s a playpen."

"I hope so.  Because I  been in places where all they do is wrap you  in a wet sheet, and let you bite down on a little rubber toy for  puppies."

 "I could see living here two weeks out of every month."

 "Well, I’m older than you are.  You can take a couple more rides on  this wheel and still get out with all your arms and legs stuck on right.  Not me."

 "Hey. You’re doing fine."

 "Talk into here."

 "Talk into your bullet hole?"

 "Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine."
Denis Johnson, from _Jesus' Son_​

Pretty sure this is when I fell in love with Johnson's prose.


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## squidtender (Aug 4, 2012)

[FONT=georgia, serif]“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”[/FONT]

[FONT=georgia, serif]-Cormac McCarthy [/FONT]_The Road_


[FONT=georgia, serif]If I lived to be a gazillion years old, I could never think of beautiful prose like that. Curse my mediocrity!  [/FONT]


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## Kyle R (Aug 5, 2012)

You can write like that, squid. I believe in you. 

She doesn't try to worm her way out of the shell, but deeper, until the pain in her head pulses like song. She pushes her soft body as far back into the shell as it will go. Back, back, through a curtain of stinging salt water. Wind and rain come piping through the cracks, peeling her lips away from her face, lifting her wet hair. She reaches blindly along the Cornuta's rain-slicked sides, searching for the origins of the music. Her knuckles rap up against the seahorse coil of the Cornuta's apex. But Big Red finds only angled walls and blistered pearls, the small bumps where the shell plates have puckered and fused together, like vestigal knobs to vanished doors.

- Karen Russel, _The City of Shells_ (Short Story)


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## Tiamat (Aug 5, 2012)

"She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she  walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each  assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said,  what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they  argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut  themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous  together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in  the midst of ruin?"

_-The Blind Assassin_ by Margaret Atwood


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## squidtender (Aug 5, 2012)

KyleColorado said:


> You can write like that, squid. I believe in you.



LOL. Thank you KC. :joyous:


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## Kyle R (Aug 5, 2012)

I lean my cheek against the translucent outer wall of one of the caves. Water whispers inside: _You are going to die up here—nobody knows where you are…._ Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It’s not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother’s old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

- Karen Russell, _St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves_


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## MariahNaomi (Aug 6, 2012)

if it was 5 days ago... She wouldnt have doubted you loved her at all. And that racoon lined girl is looking at the clock that says 10 minutes till lunch and she dosnt care because your not there. But she remembers a time when she would walk out that door and she would be able to hold you, but not to day. Not any more. Shes clutching her  umbrella instead of you as the sky opens up and crys for her.


-by me (Slightly edited from the original)


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## Jeko (Aug 9, 2012)

Every lover is in his heart a madman, and in his head a minstrel.

-Neil Gaiman

Nathan Carter liked dead things

-Me (first line of a WIP)


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## Max22 (Aug 9, 2012)

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” 
― George Orwell, 1984


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## Kyle R (Aug 10, 2012)

Mornings the barber left his stylists inside and sat outfront of his shop, drinking coffee and ogling every woman in sight. He ogled old women and pregnant women and women whose photographs were passing on the sides of buses and, this morning, a woman with close-cropped black hair and tear-stained cheeks, who wouldn’t be half bad if she’d just make an effort, clean up her face a little and invest in some decent clothes, some white tights and a short skirt maybe, knee boots and a cowboy hat and a cigarillo, say, and he pictured her kneeling on a crude Mexican sofa in a little mud hut, daring him to take her, and soon they’d screwed their way into some sort of bean field while gaucho guys played soft guitars, although actually he’d better put the gaucho guys behind some trees or a rock wall so they wouldn’t get all hot and bothered from watching the screwing and swoop down and stab him and have their way with Miss Hacienda as he bled to death, and, come to think of it, forget the gauchos altogether, he’d just put some soft guitars on the stereo in the hut and leave the door open, although actually what was a stereo doing in a Mexican hut? Were there outlets? 

_- The Barber's Unhappiness
_by George Saunders


The most enjoyable run-on sentence I've seen in recent memory. ​


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## Jeko (Aug 10, 2012)

^You haven't read Fat Charlie's hangover:

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and  his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his  stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his  knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and  replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to  try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but  they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing  nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian  motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his  pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.

-Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys


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## JosephB (Aug 10, 2012)

The thing was, they had to have a serious  talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things  that had to be discussed. They’d talk again. Maybe after the holidays  were over and things got back to normal. He’d tell her the g*ddamn  ashtray was a g*ddamn dish, for example.


—  Raymond Carver, A Serious Talk


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## Jon M (Aug 10, 2012)

What word can be uttered about those fields? She stood in the middle of them as on a high mountain, with her red hair pulled out sideways by the wind, around her the green and grey plains pressed down flat, and all the grasses of Iowa whistling one note.

Denis Johnson, _Work_ (from _Jesus' Son_)​


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## Kyle R (Aug 11, 2012)

Even without enhancements, you 
can pilot a boat in a semi-conscious 
state.

Human beings are superhuman.

Let the moon and the stars direct you.

- _Black Box
by Jennifer Egan_


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## Deleted member 49710 (Aug 15, 2012)

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. 
- Marilynne Robinson, _Housekeeping_ (214).
​ 
(Open this book at any random page and chances are there's a line that will stop you in your tracks.)


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## Kyle R (Aug 20, 2012)

"I'm sorry," you tell Lizzie. 

"It's okay," she says, and you know you should leave it there—it's fine, leave it alone, but some crazy engine inside you won't let you stop: "I'm sorry your mom is a bigot. I'm sorry Bix has to have a girlfriend from Texas. I'm sorry I'm an a--hole. I'm sorry I make you nervous because I tried to kill myself. I'm sorry to get in the way of your nice afternoon..." Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they'll forgive you, they won't desert you, and the question is, which one is really "you," the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?

- Jennifer Egan, _Out of Body_


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## Jon M (Aug 20, 2012)

It's 2:45 in the morning
And I'm putting myself on warning
For waking up in an unknown place
With a recollection you've half-erased.
Elliott Smith, _2:45 A.M._​


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## Jeko (Aug 24, 2012)

From a short piece I wrote out of the blue yesterday:

_On her face were the faded signs of face-painted parties._


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## Deleted member 49710 (Nov 7, 2012)

Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time"

I don't speak Spanish, but I always like to include the original language when possible, so here it is:

El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El 'mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.


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## Mutimir (Nov 8, 2012)

*“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all-”

― F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise


This was a great exercise. Makes you really analyze your own work and strive for something better. *


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## Cirse (Nov 8, 2012)

I came up with this in middle school and could never use it anyw


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## Cirse (Nov 8, 2012)

Umm.. Trying again... Something odd happened. Anyway... I came up with this in middle school and never found anywhere to use it. A bit cheesey, but sentimental to me.

    'Night wrapped itself around him like the sweet seduction of a vampire's kiss.'


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## Towerguy (Nov 8, 2012)

a small clip from one of my 'projects'


I stepped outside into the chill of the evening air, the sun had slid behind  the thickening clouds and the street was as cold and empty as I felt. In the distance a siren began to wail and grow nearer. Sliding the warm gun into my pocket I began to walk, leaving the priest and all his religious trappings behind me.


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## Mutimir (Nov 9, 2012)

Here is a clip after an analysis:

His heart began to race as he realized what she was truly saying. He never really knew knew for sure until this day. Their two lives had always been connected by environment and he was blindly content with that understanding. However, their unconditional support forced them to this inevitable moment. A situation where the two must settle the arrangement face to face.  A moment where cowards flee and the brave unite.


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## shedpog329 (Nov 9, 2012)

"...believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with it's mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."
*
William Faulkner: A Rose For Emily

*
“Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make  it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s  going. Not against: with.” 

*Robert Frost
*

"What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?"

*Exodus 20: 3-17

*
 Beauty, one taken said, turn those that seize the world. Now In conquering it keenly, change It.

*Myself: Beauty
*
"I would hold on tightly to the end of sentencing strings, contempt to bind the threads that carrion the tangled words from a juries chapping lips.  Palm readers were just the same, “I can tell you’re worries are heavy hands, while your futures just the same”"

*Myself: Hanging Frowns

*"When it was early, I used to take turns up and down the parallels of the tobacco fields.  The migrants were usually the ones tending the morning, the John Deere’s route and the sun enfolding the tractors before the passing that would make you squint your eyes funny."

*Myself: The Secret*


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## Newman (Nov 10, 2012)

Jon M said:


> favorite lines



Beyonce says 'Take that Mitches' as Barack Obama wins US election | Gigwise


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## Jeko (Nov 10, 2012)

_I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to.

_Donnie Darko.


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