Your favourite literary passages

enid: 'why do you have this?'

rebecca: 'what?'

enid: (picks up copy of 'sassy') 'i hate this fucking magazine! these stupid girls think they're so hip, but they're just a bunch of trendy stuck-up prep school bitches who think they're 'cutting-edge' because they know who "sonic youth" is!'

rebecca: 'you're a stuck-up prep-school bitch!'

enid: 'fuck you! i can't believe you bought this!'

rebecca: (looking at tv) 'wait! ssh! shut up! this is that lame comedian i was telling you about!'

creepy comedian on television set: 'henh henh -- my family -- what can i say? my family makes the addams family look like the waltons!' (canned laughter) 'just because i still live with my mother people think i'm peculiar -- so what if she's been dead fifteen years?' (canned laughter)

enid: 'oh man, that's so pathetic...that's not even a joke.'

rebecca: 'i know...isn't he great! look at his shoes -- if he's such a 'weirdo', how come he's wearing nikes?'

They viewed Vanessa's intelligence as an act of willful disobedience against a school that wanted only for its students to have clear skin, pliant demeanors, and no overly inner-city desire for elaborately constructed sports sneakers.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off-the leaving genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

Or, Slough

'Bastian. why dont you do what you dream! Call My name!'

"Listen, my friends, I give you Paris, including loony bins. Founded in the year dot, going cheap. Winner or universal runner-up in every exhibition. 9,000 year lease. Wholesale and retail building sites of hand-made happiness. By appointment to throne-loads of royals. Highly recommended. Prevents precocious balding! Lotteries! Expeditions to the provinces. We never close. Subscriptions. Agent for genteel second-hand suffering, guaranteed untouched by human heart. Credit given as long as it’s cash. Cash, my friends!

And it feeds and importexports through a score of customstations. Sad rain, goods train. All yours, gods and other surplices, church props and confetti, service on the third floor, going up, ineffable customer! All yours, darling, love, its golden sickbeds and ragged nappies will do for monogrammed loveletters, bottom drawers and babyclothes, the only salts that really cleanse, oh anorexia! Harem jewels, tassels, trams and pocket mirrors, fiction! And down under by the way, they’re working so that Paris eats…

By the unuprootable elite, but whence?, but whose? Linen whorehouses, wedding derangements, mourning unlimited, bitchuperation, á la carte resentments. And foster suburbs, lice-ridden peat, old nags munching broken crocks, and shards and soles and silhouettes across the fortified skyline. And rain! Three tea towels in an attic fanlight. A dog is barking at that ball up there. And cloisterphobic corners, clanging inconciliable des wearies. Sunsets in society pastels of bankrupt gemstock. Genius at factory prices, juggling with empty authorial jingles by cigarette-light. Twenty four hours a day aren’t enough for the discreet elite!

Again the public cries arise. Please note, mortgages are off, float the Panama Canal. Good buys, wise guys. Credit on or off demand, purchase of real and ephemeral estate and usury; loans on life or otherwise insurance; timetables, directories, gifts. Round trips at reduced prices. Mme Ludovic foretells the future from 2 to 4. Toys in the Children’s Paradise and party accessories for grown-ups. Large selection of battered principles. More cries! Sole agent! Celebratory suppers for the nth performance. Marinoni circular machines! Everything guaranteed, everything free! And life goes faster! Sole agent…

Second-hand calendars, months and years. And autumn sods off into the Bois de Boulogne, winter freezes the pauper’s beans on flower-paintless plates. May’s a laxative, the heatwave’s dirty beachy breezes bleach expensive dresses. Then as we live in cashdown times there comes the courteous guys who undertake and autopsy and raise their hats to the old one-cat’s-eyed sun. And history goes on making up and crossing out its moth-holed repetetive accounts – Down, balance-sheet, down boy!"

Favorite passage, er. Well, I wouldn't call this my favorite per se, but I will say the opening pages of Snow Crash remain some of the funniest stuff I've ever read. It's so LA it hurts.

...This was high summer, years before and late in the day when me and Afton started up Eye Hill, stopped awhile to watch a squirrel stutter-run along the top log of a rotted crib for skidding timber, watched it run as if it were jumping through itself, its tail floating behind, acorns and seeds and pods and nuts on its mind. Afton was two years older than me. I was eighteen and she was twenty and I was so in love that, when we touched, my bones ached to come through my skin to meet hers.

Afton liked to think and was a kind of beautiful. She was in love with ideas and books, and sometimes her eyes would flare and she'd go quiet and then patiently explain her thinking. She wore a tan that looked dusted on and she had long white hair and she'd braid it and it'd stay without a clip or barrette for the longest time, slowly coming undone, and then she'd braid it again. One day she was stopped on the street and offered a thousand dollars for her hair and she laughed and shook her head. I know this because I was walking with her. When we walked we fit, and sometimes she'd turn her cheek to my neck and I'd feel like I was king of the universe and she was the polestar and we were in concert.

That was how I was in love with her, but at the time I don't think she'd quite made up her mind about loving me.

Afton had been away from here for some weeks but surprised me when she showed up this sunstruck afternoon. She dropped her yellow Schwinn ten-speed in the grass at lane's end and came walking across the mowing like she'd walked all the way from the seacoast where she'd been.

But right now I'm thinking about that passage in Beckett's Molloy that discusses the methods of moving stones in one pocket, sucking on them for a little while, and then placing them in another pocket.

For the record, the passage I quoted is a translation of Laforgue's Grande Complainte de la Ville de Paris, copied from pages 41-2 of this book.

Took you a while to remember huh?

Ha yeah. Every now and again I wanna show that passage to someone and I google a phrase from it. Until now, my post on this thread has been the only place it appears on the internet. Suddenly that book shows up as well, so I thought I'd add the info in case Fiona's still interested.