The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Her playing was of the utmost sincerity. And Chopin, played simply, devastates the heart. Sometimes a pause between the piercing sorrows of minor notes made a sister scrubbing the floor weep into the bucket where she dipped her rag so that the convent's boards, washed in tears, seemed to creak now in a human tongue. The air of the house thickened with sighs.

The Famished Road

There was not one amongst us who looked forward to being born. We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

Mama Day

This would have to be the last morning I'd spend with you. I couldn't control what my heart was doing, but I'd made up my mind about that. I could tell you, mission accomplished, you'd seen enough to go out on your own. I could tell you I'd be busy with extra work. Or since I owed you nothing, I could simply tell you nothing at all. Then you came up to me, smelling like a stranded summer day, apologizing for being late, but you'd been to the Coliseum book store, got turned around because it was a section you're rarely in, pulled out a copy of 'King Lear' and took my breath away.

Beloved

On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue. They never expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn't care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws-a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair-wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher. The water sucked and swallowed itself beneath them. There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it appropriately and well.

Love in the Time of Cholera

In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. Desperate to infect her with his own madness, he sent her miniaturist's verses inscribed with the point of a pin on camellia petals. It was he, not she, who had the audacity to enclose a lock of his hair in one letter, but he never received the response he longed for, which was an entire strand of Fermina Daza's braid.

The House of the Spirits

She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people's abandoned children, her own poor relatives, and anybody else who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt; the kind of woman who's the pillar of many other lives, who raises her children to grow up and leave her and lets her men leave her too, without a word of reproach, because she has more pressing things to worry about...It was then I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women.

Midnight's Children

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me,of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I," every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

The Poisonwood Bible

"The sins of my fathers are not insignificant. But we keep moving on. As Mother used to say, not a thing stands still but sticks in the mud. I move my hands by day, and by night, when my fever dreams come back and the river is miles below me, I stretch out over the water, making that endless crossing, reaching for balance. I long to wake up, and then I do. I wake up in love, and work my skin to darkness under the equatorial sun. I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether."

Love Medicine

"He stood there looking at me over that long, shiny space. It rolled and gleamed like a fine lake between us. And it deepened. I saw that he was about to take the first step, and I let him, but halfway into the room his eyes went dark. He was afraid of how deep this was going to become. So I did for Nector Kashpaw what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him. I held it out there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in."

Oedipus the King

"A deadly footed, double striking curse, from father and mother both, shall drive you forth out of this land, with darkness on your eyes, that now have such straight vision."

Hamlet

"If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too."

The Woman Warrior

"When the thermometer in our laundry reached one hundred and eleven degrees on summer afternoons, either my mother or my father would say that it was time to tell another ghost story so that we could get some good chills up our backs. My parents, my brothers, sisters, great-uncle, and "Third Aunt," who wasn't really our aunt but a fellow villager, someone else's third aunt, kept the presses crashing and hissing and shouted out the stories. Those were our successful days, when so much laundry came in, my mother did not have to pick tomatoes."

Crime and Punishment

"Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I...I wanted to have the daring...and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring, Sonia! That was the whole cause of it!"

Lolita

"You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this?"

"No," she said. "No, honey no." She had never called me honey before. "No," she said, "it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean..."

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally ("He broke my heart. You merely broke my life").

MacBeth

"He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear his hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear: And you all know security is mortals' chiefest enemy."

Delta Wedding

"Then she was glad there was nothing at all, no existence in the world, beyond George asleep, this real and forgetful and exacting body. She slept by him as if in the shadow of a mountain of begin. Any moon and stars there were could rise and set over his enfolding, unemanating length. The sun could lean over his backside and wake her."

Pride and Prejudice

"I knew enough of your disposition to be certain, that, had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly." Elizabeth coloured and laughed as she replied, "Yes, you know enough of my frankness to believe me capable of that. After abusing you so abominably to your face, I could have no scruple in abusing you to all your relations."

Much Ado About Nothing

Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme. I have tried, I can find out no rhyme to "lady" but "baby," and innocent rhyme; for "scorn," "horn," a hard rhyme; for "school" "fool," a babbling rhyme. Very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.

-Benedick, Act 5 Scene 2

Their Eyes Were Watching God

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

The Age of Innocence

She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead. He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearth-rug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe. She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze. "Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried. "I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up."

The Odyssey

"Kyklops, you ask my honorable name? Remember the gift you promised me, and I shall tell you. My name is Nohbdy: mother, father, and friends, everyone calls me Nohbdy." And he said: "Nohbdy's my meat, then, after I eat his friends. Others come first. There's a noble gift, now."  Even as he spoke, he reeled and tumbled backward, his great head lolling to one side: and sleep took him like any creature. Drunk, hiccuping, he dribbled streams of liquor and bits of men.

Jane Eyre

The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of a pitcher which I flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr. Rochester at last. Though it was dark, I knew he was awake because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himslef lying in a pool of water. "Is there a flood?" he cried.  "no, sir," I answered, "but there has been a fire: get up, do, you are quenched now; I will fetch you a candle."        "In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?" he demanded. "What have you done with me, witch, sorceress? Who is in the room besides you? Have you plotted to drown me?"           

Dracula

There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck...It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.

The Country of the Pointed Firs:

We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge."

 

 

The Secret Life of Bees:

" Whenever I opened one, T-Ray said, 'Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?' The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by."  (chapter 1)

Shantaram:

"The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry." (chapter 30)

Mrs. Dalloway:

"One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and hear and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry."

The Woman Warrior:

"To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear."

The Hours:

"There is true art in it, this command of tea and dinner tables; this animating correctedness. Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subject; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed." (Mrs. Woolf, page 84)