In my last post, I wrote about one of my favourite movies, The Truth About Cats and Dogs. In the post before that, I wrote about feminist TV icon Miranda Hobbes from Sex And The City. Both times, the comments showed a surprising unity in the way we consume media. For …Cats and Dogs, we all pinpointed the phone scene as the most memorable moment in the movie – I called it “one of the sweetest, sexiest, most grown up experiences I’ve seen on film”. In SA TC, the scene that really resonated with us was Miranda’s bra buying scene shortly before her mother’s funeral. These are just two little examples of popular culture touching our lives in little but profound ways.
For me, having ‘lived’ in books since I discovered reading about the age of 4½, there are certain passages that have the power to make me feel alive – sad, euphoric, angry, humbled or just real. I was that kid who found another world in bound pages, and while I was encouraged never to write in a book (I found class-sanctioned book annotation for GCSEs traumatic), I enjoyed noting the passages that moved me.
"Will I ever write a quotable masterpiece..?"
I recently sent over one of my favourite passages to a friend who’s experienced a great loss recently. With hindsight, I’m not sure it was entirely appropriate, but I hope she received it in the spirit in which it was sent. It’s from Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing and reads thus:
When he calls and tells you he misses you, you invite him over. He spends the night. In the morning, he asks where his razor is.You tell him that you threw it away when you broke up. He says, “I framed your deodorant.”
Isn’t that just brilliant? The book is rammed with superb little passages like this one, and though the sentiment they convey can sometimes seem trite, they almost always move me. I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s The Collected Stories (so’s my pal The Writer’s Pet), and hers is the kind of writing that exults in snappy, memorable prose.
Now it’s over to you. Please fill up my comment space with brief (or not so brief!) passages of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, crime, thriller, romance or whatever. I only ask that they have moved you – whether to laughter, tears, anger or compassion – and that you love them. Thank you!
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Oh damn, I want to be the person who knows all these amazing life affirming quotations, but despite being another bookish sort, I’m actually crap at stuff like this. I can’t quote poems, passages or pithy sayings at all. I’m also terrible with lyrics. I have a memory like a goldfish for words…
He began to sing a Mexican song, very softly, and then hummed the tune. His head bobbed up and down as he followed the beat of the song.
“Do you think you and I are equals?” he asked in a sharp voice.
His question caught me off guard. I experienced a peculiar buzzing in my ears as though he had actually shouted his words, which he had not done; however, there had been a metallic sound in his voice that was reverberating in my ears.
I scratched the inside of my left ear with the small finger of my left hand. My ears itched all the time and I had developed a rhythmical nervous way of rubbing the inside of them with the small finger of either hand. The movement was more properly a shake of my whole arm.
Don Juan watched my movements with apparent fascination.
“Well… are we equals?” he asked.
“Of course we’re equals” I said.
I was, naturally, being condescending. I felt very warm towards him even though at time I did not know what to do with him; yet I still held in the back of my mind, although I would never voice it, the belief that I, being a university student, a man of the sophisticated Western world, was superior to an Indian.
“No.” he said calmly, “we are not.”
“Why, certainly we are,” I protested.
“No,” he said in a soft voice. “We are not equals. I am a hunter and a warrior, and you are a pimp.”
My mouth fell open. I could not believe that don Juan had actually said that. I dropped my notebook and stared at him dumbfoundedly and then, of course, I became furious.
He looked at me with calm and collected eyes. I avoided his gaze. And then he began to talk. He enunciated his words clearly. They poured out smoothly and deadly. He said that I was pimping for someone else. That I was not fighting my own battles, but the battles of some unknown people. That I did not want to learn about plants or about hunting or about anything. And that his world of precise acts and feeling and decisions was infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy I called “my life”.
After he finished talking I was numb. He had spoken with out belligerence or conceit but with such power, and yet such calmness, that I was not even angry anymore.
We remained silent. I felt embarrassed and could not think of anything appropriate to say. I waited for him to break the silence. Hours went by, Don Juan became motionless by degrees, until his body had acquired a strange, almost frightening rigidity; his silhouette became difficult to make out as it got dark, and finally when it was pitch black around us he seemed to have merged into the blackness of the stones. His state of motionlessness was so total that it was as if he did not exist any longer.
It was midnight when I realized that he could and would stay motionless there in that wilderness, in those rocks, perhaps for ever if had to. His world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was indeed superior.
I quietly touched his arm and tears flooded me.
From “Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan
It was appropriate – it was life, where it exists – in exchanges and promises, and it’s such a good paragraph because you get a whole wonderful story in those short lines.
I’ve been reading a lot lately, all in one ear and out the other. But one writer I’ve gravitated to is Sherman Alexie, there’s a scene in Reservation Blues where these two sisters, Chess and Checkers, are reminiscing about growing up on the Res, and how they were so poor that it was a special treat to get a bottle of Pepsi from their Dad. And when they got two bottles, they stuck them in the snow to cool them down – only to hear a pop! from inside, and run out to find their precious, promising drinks exploded all over the snow. So one of them picks up a handful, and sucks it – Pepsi ice. It’s about dredging joy out of anything, or at least that’s how I read it.
I loved The Girls’ Guide too! It was marketed as chick-lit, but it transcends that genre in all possible ways. It’s one of the few books that I have absolutely insisted that friends of mine read, and it’s clear that I need to revisit it. I think Melissa Bank is seriously, seriously underrated.
My favourite passage, for its compulsive rhythmic syncopation, and its rueful, clear-eyed heartbreak. is the last passage from Norman Maclean’s utterly wonderful A River Runs Through It. It’s an old man’s account of the death of his beautiful, headstrong, catastrophic brother when they were young, and is painfully lovely in every quiet syllable. I remember reading it when I was 13, and it made such an impression on me that even now, I can type it here without needing the text for reference:
“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. And now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
I recently wrote about this passage making me cry, from Marina Endicott’s “Good to a Fault” (it’s a scene between a mother and her young son):
‘After you’re gone from sight, and can’t be seen, or be with us, will you still love me?’ Trying to get at the idea of dead without saying the word of dead.
‘Oh yes,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’ll love you forever.’
‘So will I,’ Trevor said.
Let me be clear – I tried NOT to cry at this, but was completely powerless against it. It might also be that just the phrase “Love You Forever” reminds me of the Robert Munsch book, which has this ridiculous Pavlovian effect on me (seriously, I can’t even describe the basic plot of the book without getting teary).
Brilliant! You all got into this. I was worried it would be a comment-less mess.
@Nikky: Trust me, that’s hardly me. I think I remember two or three bits from fiction, and a bit of a Pablo Neruda poem I learned about six years ago! And I always feel a bit wanky for knowing them…
@Shabana: Holy epic, Batman! That was almost hypnotic. D’you know, I’ve never read Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan. Don’t judge.
@Margo: Reservation Blues sounds brilliant, if only for the excellently named sister characters. And I love anything that manages to make something depressing life-affirming as opposed to just plain miserable.
@Adriana: I LOVE Melissa Bank. I think she has such a strong voice, and everything she writes is just beautiful. I have neither read nor watched A River Runs Through It, but that passage is beautiful. For some reason I can hear it in Sir Anthony Hopkins’ rich baritone.
@Lija: That is tear-worthy. I love it when books make me cry. It’s a perverse pleasure, and I like to imagine the author sitting at home, marking another notch on their wooden scoreboard every time their work affects someone so deeply.