what the title says.
there are sooo many for me but one of my favorite quotes ever is from a clockwork orange by anthony burgess:
“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
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I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but it’s extremely well-written and elegant:
“As the plan of battle lies in the general’s brain, when to move the left wing, when to explode the mine, when to bring up the cavalry, so the plan of a Hunters’ Pie and the obstacles chance might put in its way—a change in the wind upsetting the oven, an insufficiency of basil, the cat filching the anchovies—had occupied Ludla’s mind since daybreak.”
This one’s from the short story The Power of Cookery by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the way it’s written and the comparison are both so well done it makes me pleased to read it (and even convinced me to underline the passage in a forty-year-old book).
tonight were slaying phantoms. - Anais Nin diary
“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
“Despite their vastly different paths they found themselves transplants in a decadent and disorientating city besieged by bombing raids, it was in this familiar happenstance that they found refuge in each other.”
on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong
“They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now, Ashley said it was the only way to live.”
From ‘Night Film’ by Marisha Pessl.
Carson McCullers: Sorrow parallels desire in the immense complexity of love.
“Then the trees, after a long silence, began to talk again in yellow and red.” - Hope Mirrless, Lud-in-the-Mist
“Everyone loses their way at some point, and it’s not just because of their mistakes or the decisions they make. It’s because they’re horribly, wonderfully human. And the one thing I’ve learned about being human is that we can’t do this alone. When we’re lost, we need help to try to find our way again.”
-Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
“He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.” -Micah Nemerever, These Violent Delights
“My mother is a fish” -William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.” -Virginia Woolf, The Waves (honestly I could put the entirety of the waves here)
“You are nothing at all. Just a crack where the light slipped through” -Sophocles, Electra (trans. Anne Carson)
“Yellow? Even in dreams he doesn’t know me at all” -Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? Feed them first, then ask virtue of them.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The end of Grapes of Wrath when the girl breastfeeds the starving Okie. That’s both earthy and touching. Steinbeck was a master.
“Look at the world out there. My God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face, and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it’s finally me, where it’s in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get a hold of it so it will never run off. I’ll hold on to the world tight someday. I’ve got one finger on it now. That’s a beginning.” - Fahrenheit 451
“Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like the chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.” Rebecca Solnit
“If we had a worship, it was of the struggling brilliance of life - regardless of form or purpose.” - Beholder’s Eye, Julie E. Czerneda
It’s one of my favorite lines from a book. It’s actually in my profile.
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch