Post a descriptive sentence from a favorite work of fiction

[pagerbear]

One of my faves:

"The fog pressed against the plate glass windows like a fat lady in ermine."

Amistead Maupin
One of the Tales of the City books--can't remember which one

[LisaM]

1. I might have this a little bit off...

"when she was eighteen, and her hair was more beautiful than she."

From "Tender is the Night." It's such a beautiful line; it just makes me sigh.

[mitchtv]

2. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".

TOTC

[DS1]

3. I don't have the book in front of me, but...

The Deliverator's car is so fucking fast that if he passed a speed trap during a run he'd be out of sight before the cop had chance to swallow his donut

I suppose I'll share the title - Snowcrash

[Occulus]

4. Can it be a phrase?

Please? :)

"On the red moon will come the firestorm. The one bonded to the blade will watch as his people die. If he does nothing, he and all those he love will die in its heat, for no blade, forged of steel or conjured of sorcery, can touch this foe.

He must seek the remedy in the wind. Lightning will find him on that path, for the one in white, his true beloved, will betray hin in her blood."

-Terry Goodkind, prophecy, "Temple of the Winds"

[Richardo]

5. I first saw this one in a Stephen King story....

"As out of place as a cockroach on a wedding cake."

THAT imagery has stuck with me, needless to say.

[amber dog democrat]

6. As he stood facing the firing squad, Col Auraleano Buendia

remembered the first time his father took him to see ice....

Gabrial Garcia Marquez... One Hundered Years of Solitude.

[Mandate My Ass]

25. I'm reading that now

GGM's writing is sublime.

"The great swamp in the west mingled with a boundless extension
of water where there were soft-skinned cetaceans that had the head
and torso of a woman, causing the ruination of sailors with the charm of their extraordinary breasts."

.....

"They were new gypsies, young men and women who knew only their own language, handsome specimens with oily skins and intelligent hands, whose dances and music sowed a panic of uproarious joy through the streets, with parrots painted all colors reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who read minds, and a multiple use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, anda poultice to lose time, and a thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that Jose Arcadio Buendia must have wanted to invent a memory machine so that he could remember them all."

[Birthmark]

7. Douglas Adams.

"It hung in the air in exactly the way a brick doesn't." There are several others nearly as good by Adams.

[BigMcLargehuge]

8. from "Tears of Amaterasu"

as yet unpublished -

Hideki Kubo soothed the welts and bruises across his back and legs as he walked away from the sparse main street of Iiyama. Late season snow fluttered down from the sky and collected on both the walking path along the banks of the Senkyoku River and threatened to cover the sweeping fields of springtime Rape Blossoms stretching up the hill from the river and over the rolling hills outside the village. His eyes burned but refused to produce any more tears.

[ThoughtCriminal]

9. My God! It's full of stars!

2001 - A.C. Clarke

[Richardo]

11. Yes!

:thumbsup:

"One by one, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

The Nine Billion Names of God A.C. Clarke...

[Westegg]

14. YES!!! Read that when I was 12. Have NEVER forgotten it.

[Richardo]

16. Right on my brother...I was about that age too...

I collected all his novels and especially short stories for many years. Saw 2001 over 30 times, read the book all in one Sunday afternoon when I was about 12.

Good times...! :)

[Westegg]

18. Hey Richardo: Is that the great CLEMENTE?

#21? I can't tell from the small picture. Looks like it...

Roberto was/is my idol.

[Richardo]

19. It is indeed the Great One...

I'm originally from Western PA. East Rochester to be exact. :D

Although we moved west in 1960, I got to see Roberto play in Forbes Field in 1969 and in his last season at Three Rivers in 1972. That plus a number of times in LA when the Bucs went to play the Dodgers.

[Westegg]

21. The Great One indeed...

...The first and only season I got to see him live, as opposed to TV, was '72---his last one. I'll never forget it. You saw him at Forbes Field! You're fortunate.

[TN al]

10. Ooh ooh ohh...

...Nobody take Jack London 'cause I have a real good one but I have to go home and find it. I will put it on edit later. It goes something like this," Each of them spent the day in wonderment why God would have taken the time to create the other."

[TN al]

20. I didn't know editing time expired...

...Anyway here it is from "In a Far Country": And a great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how God had ever come to create the other.

While I was coming home I also thought of this one by Fitzgerald: Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

It is a tie for my favorite.

[Westegg]

12. From Pynchon's "Vineland"...

...and still the best description of driving on L.A.'s freeways at night that I have ever read:


"So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world."

[Sirveri]

13. Sun Tzu: Manual For War

If you wish to reap the benefits of military action, you must first understand fully the pitfalls of military action. The one depends on the other.

[RoBear]

15. I don't have a copy handy, but

at the end of one episode of DANDELION WINE by Ray Bradbury they're sitting on the porch and the section ends, "And the voices droned on into the coming years." The book is full of great stuff like that.

The IMAGE I can't get out of my head is at the end of the first chapter of THE GREAT GATSBY when he reaches his hand toward the light across the water.

[TN al]

22. That is the paragraph after the one I chose...

...it goes: "But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone - he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling." or perhaps you meant the next sentence: "Involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock."

[pscot]

17. "Lord Jim" by Conrad

"You must to the destructive element commit yourself, and by the motion of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up." Old man Stein telling Jim what it takes to live.

[KamaAina]

23. We were somewhere near Barstow on the edge of the desert...

...when the drugs began to take hold.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[Elidor]

24. The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could...

But when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

Everyone should know it.