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I dont know about anyone else but if a book doesnt grab me in the first couple of pages then its a no go……..heres one of the most famous opening passages of a book I have read more than once………absolute classic!! some of the books I have read also had some memorable quotes , more later but im sure some of you have something to add x
Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done. But as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it. Nature had come into her own again, and little by little had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers, on and on while the poor thread that had once been our drive. And finally, there was Manderley – Manderley – secretive and silent. Time could not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls. Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, and suddenly it seemed to me that light came from the windows. And then a cloud came upon the moon and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it. I looked upon a desolate shell, with no whisper of a past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again. That much is certain. But sometimes, in my dreams, I do go back to the strange days of my life which began for me in the south of France…
~May Contain Nuts by John O’Farrell
I can attest to this observation. At the first tiny jump in the thermometer each Spring, Londoners put on their spaghetti strap dresses, tube tops, shorts, flip flops, or even worse, go TOPLESS and swarm the city sidewalks. Letting it all hangout on parade at 20 degrees C.
Favourite lines from jane eyre:
“No sight so sad as that of a naughty girl,” he began, “especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?”
“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.
“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”
“A pit full of fire.”
“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”
“No, sir.”
“What must you do to avoid it?”
I deliberated a moment: my answer when it did come was objectionable. “I must keep in good health, and not die.”One can’t return to Manderley, but one can go back to Mandalay. :wink:
I remember a line from the end of another Du Maurier novel, “My Cousin Rachel,” where Rachel falls from a bridge, and while dying in Philip’s arms he says, “Until we meet again, Rachel, I shall live in blessed torment.”
Stephen1
@stephen1 wrote:
One can’t return to Manderley, but one can go back to Mandalay. :wink:
I remember a line from the end of another Du Maurier novel, “My Cousin Rachel,” where Rachel falls from a bridge, and while dying in Philip’s arms he says, “Until we meet again, Rachel, I shall live in blessed torment.”
Stephen1
wonderful stuff ay? x
The Moving Finger by Edith Wharton
Opening Paragraphs.
The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder—one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. So many people are like badly composed statues, overlapping their niches at one point and leaving them vacant at another. Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the resort. such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. Ralph Grancy’s was, in short, a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those constructive influences that, instead of crystallising into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own dusty patch of life, and the fruitful moisture stole far beyond his boundaries. If, to carry on the metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously cultivated enclosure, his wife was the flower he had planted in its midst—the embowering tree, rather, which gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.
We had all—his small but devoted band of followers—known a moment when it seemed likely that Grancy would fail us. We had watched him pitted against one stupid obstacle after another—illhealth, poverty, misunderstanding, and, worst of all for a man of his texture, his first wife’s soft insidious egotism. We had seen him sinking under the leaden embrace of her affection like a swimmer in a drowning clutch; but just as we despaired he had always come to the surface again, blinded, panting, but striking out fiercely for the shore. When at last her death released him it became a question as to how much of the man she had carried with her. Left alone, he revealed numb withered patches, like a tree from which a parasite has been stripped. But gradually he began to put out new leaves; and when he met the lady who was to become his second wife—his one real wife, as his friends reckoned—the whole man burst into flower.
The second Mrs. Grancy was past thirty when he married her, and it was clear that she had harvested that crop of middle joy which is rooted in young despair. But if she had lost the surface of eighteen she had kept its inner light; if her cheek lacked the gloss of immaturity her eyes were young with the stored youth of half a lifetime. Grancy had first known her somewhere in the East—I believe she was the sister of one of our consuls out there—and when he brought her home to New York she came among us as a stranger. The idea of Grancy’s remarriage had been a shock to us all. After one such calcining most men would have kept out of the fire; but we agreed that he was predestined to sentimental blunders, and we awaited with resignation the embodiment of his latest mistake. Then Mrs. Grancy came—and we understood. She was the most beautiful and the most complete of explanations. We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight, and gave it hasty burial under a prodigality of welcome. For the first time in years we had Grancy off our minds. “He’ll do something great now!” the least sanguine of us prophesied; and our sentimentalist emended: “He has done it—in marrying her!”
Holy shyt…if I may use such an epithet for such gorgeous language…that was amazing! It beggars most modern contrivances in the same way that the sun banishes the dark. I am humbly floored.
Stephen
a tale of 2 cities
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Hunter S. Thompson ~ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the
solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is
certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe
that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from
the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr.
Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation
between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart
warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so
suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers
sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in
his waistcoat, as I announced my name.‘Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said.
A nod was the answer.
Emily Bronte
1847
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