Update: This is from James Agee's amazing collaboration with Walker Evans "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"
The clue I gave for this one is BRILLIANT, I have to say. I am QUITE proud of it. And if you don't get it from the clue, I don't know how to help you.
Update: It's been guessed. It is "The Sportswriter" by Richard Ford. I highly recommend his work. The sequel to "THe Sportswriter" was "Independence Day", another great book.
Here is this one. Not one guess yet.
Like I said: this author writes beautifully, sensitively, about being a man, what it means to be a man in this day and age. He's a contemporary writer, very successful.
The book this quote is from is first of a two-book series about this one character. If I say to you: "Bill Simmons" - that will give you a clue as to the title of this book.
The SECOND book, with a great title, describes how the character becomes a real estate agent. It's all about this guy's life, his divorce, his love affairs, what it means to be a man ...
The author can WRITE, man. There are certain sentences that just stick in your mind.
Here is this one.
Basically, what we have come to is that this is a short story by Truman Capote - which is (or was) in the junior high school literature curriculum.
It involves a group of kids in a little Southern town (of course) - and there's a girl who comes to town who (if I recall correctly) is very different, and bossy - and I believe she wears tap shoes, and thinks she is going to be a film star. The narrator of the story is a small boy with fairy tendencies (naturally).
And it ends with this weird little girl getting run over by the 6 o'clock bus.
Update: This has now been guessed. "War and Peace", by Tolstoy.
My clue is bad for this one. All I could say was : WHAT A BOOK.
The title of this book describes its all-encompassing nature. The title describes polar opposites.
Update: This is from "The Butcher Boy" by Patrick McCabe
Here's another one - No one has even made a guess yet.
Update: Emily has saved the day like I knew she would - although all the guesses were terrific. It is "The Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet.
Emily: Really, you must come in and put everyone out of their guessing misery.
They are SO close to the correct title ... but they still haven't gotten it.
First off: every single person who showed up yesterday and participated - with guesses (correct, incorrect, way off the mark, whatever) - has my deepest thanks. You all are fantastic. It made me feel so good, so wonderful - to have so many people come visit my insane obsessive autistic blog - and also to feel surrounded, for an entire day, by people who read, who love books, and who were racking their brains for answers.
It was a beautiful day for me, and I thank you ALL!!
There are still some un-guessed ones, but I will isolate them all into their own posts, so you can have another crack at them.
Unbelievably, there aren't that many left!! We got most of them!
Unfurling below you are the last lines of five trillion books.
Now before you dash off like lunatics:
-- Some of these are very famous short stories, or novellas.
-- Some are memoirs.
-- But most are novels.
Go.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
Believe me, I'd like to listen, but it doesn't work, because if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I'm not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can't keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if ... if only there were no other people in the world.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.
No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.
But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me -- even supposing --
It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.
Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all.
The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
He bowed low, right down to the ground, in front of the man sitting there motionless, whose smile reminded him of everything that he had ever loved in his life, of everything that had ever been of value and holy in his life.
Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinston screamed, and then they were upon her.
"John Thomas says good night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart."
The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.
P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.
In the second volume of this Journal, which will be called Morals Charge, I intend to report, describe and comment upon the festivals of an inner prison that I discover within me after going through the region of myself which I have called Spain.
They build their own cages, we could almost hear the Pigman whisper, as he took his children with him.
I swell the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to make the society of an English Yahoo by any means not insupportable, and therefore I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice, that they will not presume to appear in my sight.
And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?
The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.
He told me what he was going to do when he won his money then I said it was time to go tracking in the mountains, so off we went, counting our footprints in the snow, him with his bony arse clicking and me with the tears streaming down my face.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
" 'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world,' " whispered Anne softly.
"Daily he announces more distinctly, -- 'Surely I come quickly;' and hourly I more eagerly respond, -- 'Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!' "
In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal mobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. Amen
Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.
But the horses didn't want it -- they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."
It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
When those who found this skeleton attempted to disengage it from that which it held in its grasp it crumbled to dust.
For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
"Like a dog!" he said: it was if the shame of it must outlive him.
Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.
He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.
When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
-- But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.
Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.
But everywhere he was kindly received, for the story of his life had become generally known.
Between Barton and Delaford, there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate; -- and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that the sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.
I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.
But all these things, with an account how 300 Caribees came and invaded them, and ruin'd their plantations, and how they fought with that whole number twice, and were at first defeated, and three of them kill'd; but at last a storm destroying their enemies' canoes, they famish'd or destroy'd almost all the rest, and renew'd and recover'd the possession of their plantation, and still liv'd upon the island; all these things, with some very surprizing incidents in some new adventures of my own, for ten years more, I may perhaps give a farther account of hereafter.
I just think that is so hilarious, how it keeps going on and on and on ...
The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.
Some day it may seem worth while to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.
Taking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache.
May His grace and peace, sweet ladies, remain with you always, and if perchance these stories should bring you any profit, remember me.
To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn't (but who had in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were -- if there ever were -- Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.
God, that gives me chills.
"Oh my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!"
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.
"-- Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars -- the other kinds of men, the other lives?"
And Harry K. Thaw, having obtained his release from the insane asylum, marched annually at Newport in the Armistice Day Parade.
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers -- shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle -- to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
"For mumblety-peg, if that's where your heart lies."
Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the perseons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood where the first prim roses were beginning to bloom.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.
When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.
"There's no point in us standing here like bookends, my dear," Aurora said, and they turned and went to attend to the children and the men.
"My darling," said Valentine, "the count just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words: Wait and hope."
"Thank goodness!" said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar.
Our talk drained rather quickly off into silence and we lay thinking, analyzing, remembering, in the human artist's sense praying, chiefly over matters of the present and of that immediate past which was a part of the present; and each of these matters had in that time the extreme clearness, and edge, and honor, which I shall now try to give you; until at length we too fell asleep.
For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.
"I shall still get angry with my coachman Ivan, I shall still argue and express my thoughts inopportunely; there will still be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife, and I shall still blame her for my own fears and shall regret it; I shall still be unable to understand with my reason why I am praying, and I shall continue to pray -- but my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, every moment of it, is no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an incontestable meaning of goodness, with which I have the power to invest it."
But they never learned what it was that Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone.
Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!
Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The hills gently girdle it about; its course is fixed.
Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the food-providers and fire-providers.
Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again -
With love
Olympia Binewski
(Known as McGurk)
One of only three books where I literally burst into tears when it ended. The others were Prayer For Owen Meany, and Atonement - by Ian McEwan
April 27 Old father, old artificier, stand me now and ever in good stead.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: "Lowenstein, Lowenstein."
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The greatest last line ever written. Don't argue. At least not on THIS blog.
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:
"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES."
And Carlson said, "Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin' those two guys?"
That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
And I finally began like this: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home ...
And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Chills, I tell ya, CHILLS
At last I get to say down towards our world, "The war is over."
Mitchell, dear, I posted this one for you.
But over the old man's head they looked at each other and smiled.
She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
(One of the most memorable and heart-rending last scenes I have ever read in a novel, EVER)
He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.