A scene or a line which you remember

[upinaballoon]

Without reaching for "Wuthering Heights" I remember that at the end of the book the narrator (Lockwood?) walks on the moor and he sees butterflies dancing or fluttering among the harebells and he cannot imagine an unquiet spirit lying in that earth. I think that's the gist of it. Corrrect me if I am way off the mark.

Please share a scene or a line from a book.

Lowering the tone somewhat but it is an expression that has passed into our family from PS Your Cat is Dead by James Kirkwood

"I am so hungry I could eat the arsehole out of a dead wolf"

@WhenPushComesToShove. That is absolutely beautiful.

and to redress the balance somewhat. In Earth Abides by George R Stewart the part where the next generations use coins they have found to make arrow heads, a much more valuable commodity

[quote TwoDrifters2]**@Cornishblues* @littlepeas* @Redyellowpink

“She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year. Her own birthday, and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought, one afternoon, that there was another date, of greater importance than all those; that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?”

• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles[/quote]

It’s not that - I’ve see something very very similar somewhere else in something more modern. It’s a shame that it wasn’t an original idea, as I found it quite profound. I still can’t remember where though.

Aha thanks for identifying it as Hardy and for posting the quote all. That will be where I first came across the notion but I have definitely only read Tess once! Must have struck a chord with a later author too.

Now that Christmas is such a consumerfest, I often think of this from Little Women 😊

Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother's promise and, slipping her hand under her pillow, drew out a little crimson-covered book. She knew it very well, for it was that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guidebook for any pilgrim going on a long journey. She woke Meg with a "Merry Christmas," and bade her see what was under her pillow. A green-covered book appeared, with the same picture inside, and a few words written by their mother, which made their one present very precious in their eyes. Presently Beth and Amy woke to rummage and find their little books also, one dove-colored, the other blue, and all sat looking at and talking about them, while the east grew rosy with the coming day.

...and then ,Alcemeg, they gave their breakfasts away.

@upinaballoon

...and then ,Alcemeg, they gave their breakfasts away.

Haha, yes! You wouldn't catch me doing that, I must admit 😋

From Chanel Miller's Know My Name

I used to shrink at harsh tones, used to be afraid. Until I learned it takes nothing to be hostile. Nothing. It is easy to be the one yelling, chucking words that burn like coals, neon red, meant to harm. I have learned I am water. The coals sizzle, extinguishing when they reach me. I see now, those fiery coals are just black stones, sinking to the bottom.

That idea from Tess I've read really quite recently as well, but not in Tess (which I read about 30 years ago). Looking through the books I've read this year I think it was either Old Baggage by Lissa Evans, the main character was always coming up with quotes so it might have been that. Or possibly Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Of course it might have predated Tess.

Ha, the Tess quote was the inspiration for One Day by David Nicholls.

Lieutenant Dunbar wasn’t really swallowed. But that was the first word that stuck in his head.”

from "dances with wolves" I had to reread the line a few times and then read it in context. great book

".....'therapist' and 'the rapist'....just a matter of spacing but the effect is the same...."

from Life-Size, by Jenefer Shute.

Two for me, an opening and a closing.

Opening from catch 22 "it was love at first sight"

Closing, from the book, not the film, of The Killing Fields, "Sidney, I knew you'd come". I'm welling up just typing that.

" it was the day my grandmother exploded " great opening line from the crow road

From Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, the protagonist remembering the loss of his sister and family to the Nazis:

‘And when they saw Bella’s beauty, her terrified stillness - what did they make of her hair, did they lift its mass from her shoulders, assess its value; did they touch her perfect eyebrows and skin? What did they make of Bella’s hair as they cut it - did they feel humiliated as they fingered its magnificence, as they hung it on the line to dry?’

Read this as a student and it sent chills down my spine - I had to go back and reread the passage several times.

Also remember the passage from Tess about passing over the day of your death - it made a big impression on me as an adolescent when we did Hardy in school!

"As I stepped into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie theater I has only two things on my mind. Paul Newman and a ride home."
Beginning of The Outsiders by S E Hinton (apologies for any misquoting). I must have read it 100 times. So normal and mundane then you are launched into that world with Ponyboy.

@TerrifiedandWorried. my fav book as a teenager!

From Jane Eyre:

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.”

—Rochester

Nothing to add but love this thread.

On a lighter note, ‘I have just realised I have never seen a dead body or a real female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul de sac.’ - Adrian Mole

@Izzy24

Nothing to add but love this thread.

Thank you. I thought it had died and then saw there were a few posts yesterday. In "Cold Comfort Farm" one more of Seth's shirt buttons pop off every now and again through the story, if I remember rightly.

“It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.”

From Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - a book I haven’t been able to reread since having a child.

I don’t know if this is “allowed” since it’s not a book as such, but from one of Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems” when mourning her death:

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The Divine Comedy put these poems to music and the result is beautiful and has stayed with me for years.

William Somerset Maughan "Of Human Bondage" had several scenes that game me goose bumps and have stayed with me:

"Why do you read then?'
Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. ...”

and

“You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.”