Your favorite book... a little different

[Guest Cantousent]

So often, we see these threads. You know, the threads where someone cites his favorite book or series. Of course, it's good to know what folks favor, but maybe it's time to try a little experiment. I don't know how well it will be received, but I suggest we cite a favorite work, be it a novel, a short story, a t.v. show, or a movie. In fact, anything is fair game. The catch is this: you must not only cite what you enjoy, but quote from the work as well. Give us the one quote that made you love the work in question. I will start by quoting Dostoevsky.

 

As background, it's interesting to note that Dostoevsky, who spent time in Siberia for "crimes" against the Tsarist state, was devoutly Russian Orthodox. In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky always felt he made too good of a case for atheism. Indeed, Ivan's speech is the best attack on religion I have ever seen. All too often I see atheists make arguments meant more to appeal to other atheists. Ivan's case against Chistianity speaks to the heart of Christians. For that reason alone, it is a powerful statement. Dostoevsky, himself, always worried about Ivan's speech and felt afraid that, in trying to make the best case possible, he was not able to refute it during the course of his work. Speaking for myself, I think the work overall is a potent affirmation of Dostoevsky's Russian Orthodox faith.

 

At any rate, following is a short exchange between Ivan and Father Zossima. It is my favorite passage in a work steeped in greatness.

 

"But can it be answered by me? Answered in the affirmative?"

 

Ivan went on asking strangely, still looking at the elder with the same inexplicable smile.

 

"If it can't be decided in the affirmative, it will never ben decided in the negative. You know that that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all its suffering is due to it. But thank the Creator who has given you a lofty heart capable of such suffering; of thinking and seeking higher things, for our dwelling is in the heavens. God grant that your heart will attain the answer on earth, and may God bless your path."

[Calax]

American Gods

Shadow: Hey, Huggin or Mugen or what ever your name is."

The raven ****ed it's head and looked back at him.

"Say Nevermore."

The raven looked at him then said, "F*ck You"

Don't remember the exact lines but still.

[Kor Qel Droma]

**** it one hand, wish in the other.  See which fills up first.

 

Thats from Stephen King ( although I doubt its original) in the Dark Tower series.

[Oerwinde]

Journalism is just a gun. Its only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right its all you need. Aim right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

 

Spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan.

 

Alternatively:

 

Spider Jerusalem: More famous than Jesus, better dressed than Santa Claus, wouldn't be seen dead on a cross and has never been caught up a chimney. So I deserve you money more.

 

Also, Spider Jerusalem.

Edited October 21, 2005 by Oerwinde

[Nur Ab Sal]

Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith

 

"This is Obi-Wan Kenobi in the light:

 

As he is prodded onto the bridge along with Anakin and Chancellor Palpatine, he has no need to look around to see the banks of control consoles tended by terrified Neimoidians. He doesn't have to turn his head to count the droidekas and super battle droids, or to gauge the positions of the brutal droid bodyguards. He doesn't bother to raise his eyes to meet the cold yellow stare fixed on him through a skull-mask of armorplast. He doesn't even need to reach into the Force. He has already let the Force reach into him. The Force flows over him and around him as though he has stepped into a crystal-pure waterfall lost in the green coils of a forgotten rain forest; when he opens himself to that sparkling stream it flows into him and through him and out again without the slightest interference from his conscious will. The part of him that calls itself Obi-Wan Kenobi is no more than a ripple, an eddy in the pool into which he endlessly pours.

 

There are other parts of him here, as well; there is nothing here that is not a part of him, from the scuff mark on R2-D2's dome to the tattered hem of Palpatine's robe, from the spidering crack in one transparisteel panel of the curving view wall above to the great starships that still battle beyond it.

 

Because this is all part of the Force.

 

Somehow, mysteriously, the cloud that has darkened the Force for near to a decade and a half has lightened around him now, and he finds within himself the limpid clarity he recalls from his schooldays at the Jedi Temple, when the Force was pure, and clean, and perfect. It is as though the darkness has withdrawn has coiled back upon itself, to allow him this moment of clarity, to return to him the full power of the light, if only for the moment; he does not know why, but he is incapable of even wondering. In the Force, he is beyond questions.

 

Why is meaningless; it is an echo of the past, or a whisper from the future. All that matters, for this infinite now, is what, and where, and who.He is all sixteen of the super battle droids, gleaming in laser-reflective chrome, arms loaded with heavy blasters. He is those blasters and he is their targets. He is all eight destroyer droids waiting with electronic patience within their energy shields, and both bodyguards, and every single one of the shivering Neimoidians. He is their clothes, their boots, even each drop of reptile-scented moisture that rolls off them from the misting sprays they use to keep their internal temperatures down. He is the binders that cuff his hands, and he is the electrostaff in the hands of the bodyguard at his back. He is both of the lightsabers that the other droid bodyguard marches forward to offer to General Grievous.

 

And he is the general himself.

 

He is the general's duranium ribs. He is the beating of Grievous's alien heart, and is the silent pulse of oxygen pumped through his alien veins. He is the weight of four lightsabers at the general's belt, and is the greedy anticipation the captured weapons sparked behind the general's eyes. He is even the plan for his own execution simmering within the general's brain.

 

He is all these things, but most importantly, he is still Obi-Wan Kenobi.

This is why he can simply stand. Why he can simply wait. He has no need to attack, or to defend. There will be battle here, but he is perfectly at ease, perfectly content to let the battle start when it will start, and let it end when it will end.

 

Just as he will let himself live, or let himself die.

 

This is how a great Jedi makes war."

 

I love that fragment. It shows the perfect peace of a true Jedi Master, the nature of the Force, and how Jedi actually feel it.

Edited October 21, 2005 by Nur Ab Sal

[Child of Flame]

No accounting for taste.

 

I like Dracula by Brahm Stoker

[Guest Cantousent]

Why, Child? Why. I liked Dracula by Brahm Stoker also. ...But give us a line, describe a scene, identify a character. Give us something more, my young friend of flame.

[Child of Flame]

I don't really know.

 

The whole thing reads like poetry, and the only scene that really stuck with me was the death scene, where it was revealed that Dracula wasn't such a bad guy.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Its not my fave book but its among the most vile and insane ones ever written, its the famous "

[Commissar]

Yeah. Pleasant. Thanks for contributing.

 

I, sadly, don't have much of a memory for specific passages, only quotes that particularly stand out. I'll tell you that I pretty much devour anything by Hemingway, Umberto Eco, or Patrick O'Brian, though. All very different styles of writing, all very much engaging.

[Musopticon?]

Wow, a great topic idea.

 

 

I'd like to quote Conn Iggulden's "Gates of Rome", but sadly I can't remember any single passage from it. Definetly wrth reading however. It's a fiction tale of Gaius Julius's youth with Brutus in the Senate age of Rome. Marvelous.

 

 

This passage however, is from Frank Herbert's "Dune"; a clich

Edited October 21, 2005 by Musopticon?

[kirottu]

I don

[Musopticon?]

Riftwar? Serpentwar?

[kirottu]

I think it was in those in-between books.

[Musopticon?]

I never read Rift War, but Serpent War and the few books between were quite entertaining.

[Spider]

I'll do two:

 

First off is Michael Moorcoock (there is supposed to be one less o in the name, but that makes the language filter upset, so misspelt it is), this from the Elric Saga (if you like Fantasy at all and haven't read this then go do so immediately). Specifically this is taken from the book Stormbringer. Its not very telling to how the books read, but its very significant for those who have read the books:

 

"Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!"

 

Then something from William Gibson, this from Pattern Recognition:

 

  CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

  What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless pairing-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment,  during any year between 1945 and 2000. She is a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.

 

Edit: the name thing.

Edited October 21, 2005 by Spider

[Gabrielle]

To be or not to be.

[julonia17]

The Misfits :ph34r:

I could probably recite most of it....

anyhow....

 

Market Evaluation and Analysis for Swing Trading

A trader's skill in terms of enterpreting market data correctly is not always reflected in the way the trade.  Many participants fall victim to the market because they do not have the ability to be both a strong analyst and a good trader.

[Darth Drabek]

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

 

It's simple, and it sets the hook. The intro sentence to the first book of Stephen King's recently completed Dark Tower saga. I remember reading about King reminiscing about writing that book:

 

"That sentence was clean. The rest of it might have been puff and blow, but that, that was clean."

[Commissar]

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

 

It's simple, and it sets the hook. The intro sentence to the first book of Stephen King's recently completed Dark Tower saga. I remember reading about King reminiscing about writing that book:

 

"That sentence was clean. The rest of it might have been puff and blow, but that, that was clean."

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ha, this line actually occurred to me today, and I was just about to come in and post it. That really is a fantastic opening for a book. Say what you like about King (and I think he's a hack for everything he's done outside of the Dark Tower), this is good stuff.

[Guest Cantousent]

"It was a dark and stormy night."

[Gromnir]

oddly 'nuff, we has done this bit numerous times before... but folks get tired of Gromnir quoting all the times. has been a while.

 

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Cantousent]

"if I had been like other men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns or patiently seen the neglect of them during all these years, and have been doing yours, coming to you individually like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to regard virtue; such conduct, I say, would be unlike human nature. If I had gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have been some sense in my doing so; but now, as you will perceive, not even the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted or sought pay of any one; of that they have no witness. And I have a sufficient witness to the truth that I have not--my poverty."

[Blarghagh]

"Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

 

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die."

 

H.P. Lovecraft

 

"There was a terrible gastly silence.

There was a terrible gastly noise.

There was a terrible gastly silence."

 

Douglas Adams

 

"Then Morgoth hurled aloft Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld, and swung it down like a bolt of thunder. But Fingolfin sprang aside, and Grond rent a mighty pit in the earth, whence smoke and fire darted. Many times Morgoth essayed to smite him, and each time Fingolfin leaped away, as a lightning shoots from under a dark cloud"

 

J.R.R. Tolkien

Edited October 23, 2005 by TrueNeutral

[Musopticon?]

I was so going to post that Lovecraft-quote, but you were quicker :D