Lines that have provoked a physical reaction...

Great stuff

Wudang said:
The last paragraph of Zelazny's "lord of Light".
And pardon a scot for saying so but :
" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
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Hey, thanks. Those are lines that still resonate in my heart and mind. I would very much like them to continue to resonate in a meaningful way in hearts and minds of the rest of my countrymen. I would like for folks to remember that the sole legitimate reason for the institution and maintenance of a government is to secure those unalienable rights.
 
quote:
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Originally posted by demon
Frederick Engels at the funeral of Karl Marx.

"On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think."
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quote:
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Originally posted by Brian
"Yeah, that me giggle a little bit too."
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I see your rush to make what you perceived as a clever remark ended up with you writing nonsense.
Not the most impressive thing to do in a Literature forum.

"More haste, less speed"...I always liked that line too.
 
There's a line from "Catcher in the Rye" that i wish i'd written, goes something like :"I can just picture the sonuvab**h changing gear and asking god to send him some more stiff's" describing a undertaker. :D

In real life i must admit that Winston Churchill's "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few" are some of the cleverest words written. The story is that he composed the sentence in his car after a visit to fighter command headquarters in the heat of the battle. He had been shown around and in the operations room he witnessed a squadron being directed at a enemy force. He could se that they were heavily outnumbered and asked Park: How many reserves do we have"? Park turned calmly to him and said "None"!!!!

Dowding and Park are the unsung heroes of ww2 IMHO.
 
Harry Keogh:

" the opening paragraph of shirley jackson's The Haunting of Hill House...

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute relativity; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
eeeek!"

I`ve always loved and feared that paragraph...it`s so damn spooky. You`ll know the way that same paragraph changes at the end of the book too.
May I suggest you read "The Woman in Black" by Susan Hill if you like that kind of spooky stuff....eeeeek as you say;)
 
From Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451-

"Give the people contests they win by remembering words to popular songs ... cram them full of such non-combustable data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' that they feel stuffed ... then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. Then they'll be happy, because these kinds of facts don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

and the scariest line of the book (which about a future where books are forbidden)

"It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no censorship, no! Technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure carried the trick."

And the line I have on a poster behind my desk at school (I teach English)

"I don't talk things, I talk the meanings of things!"
 
juryjone said:
"This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch."

--Richard Matheson, "Born of Man and Woman"

Still gets me, 30 years after reading it the first time.
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When I first saw this thread, I immediately thought of this short story. I couldn't remember the name, to post my response, but I intended to look it up. I'm just like you. That was one damn distrubing story. And, a perfect indication of how NOT describing something in detail can make it so much more frightening, as each reader is left to imagine the horror...
 
Don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read it (and you should!), but I felt like I'd been punched in the chest after reading the last few pages of Proust's The Guermantes Way. In retrospect, I don't even know why this affected me so much--much more so than the similar revelation at the end of The Captive.
 
"Gustav Mahler was a saint." --Arnold Schoenberg.

Also--in context--the last line of Midnight's Children. Come to think of it, every line of that book from beginning to end made me laugh and cry. It's a really dense book, 500 pages with no fat, each sentence more outrageous and hilarious and yet vaguely tautological than the last. I sometimes try to make music like that.
 
I don't remember any specific lines word for word but many passages in The Grapes of Wrath moved me. Many passages in The Club Dumas made me think about them, reread them, think some more, then later I would be thinking about them again, Also, Life of Pi has many beautiful passages and is a great story.
 
"I opened myself to God, and I was raped." Uttered by Father Emilio Somethingorother in "the Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russel. Fabolous book. Great science fiction with very little emphasis on either the science or the fiction...
 
PogoPedant said:
"I opened myself to God, and I was raped." Uttered by Father Emilio Somethingorother in "the Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russel. Fabolous book. Great science fiction with very little emphasis on either the science or the fiction...
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I liked "The Sparrow" too, but I couldn't help feeling I was missing something. Getting raped by aliens would be humiliating but I didn't understand why it took him so long to say that's what was being done to him. Or maybe I'm mis-remembering it.
 
Hexxenhammer said:
I liked "The Sparrow" too, but I couldn't help feeling I was missing something. Getting raped by aliens would be humiliating but I didn't understand why it took him so long to say that's what was being done to him. Or maybe I'm mis-remembering it.
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I don't think it was the raping as much as the betrayal the priest felt. He'd gone through his entire life not as a believer, but as an agnostic who had decided to hope/trust in God. Then, when he arrives on this alien planet, he finally finds faith, only to have it ripped apart. Kinda like growing up... At least that's how I interpreted it.
 
The last line of Agatha Christie's "Witness for the Prosecution" really jolted me. (I will not quote it, because it only makes sense in the context of the story.) In retrospect, I should have seen it coming, but I didn't.
 
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