The Most Astounding Paragraph You've Ever Read... - WritingForums.com - Writing Forums, Writing Challenges, Critiques and Help for Writers

Truth-Teller · 01-26-2008, 03:49 AM

in a novel.

Is there a particular prose, in a novel or short story, that just took your breath away, and wondered how he or she created the sentences so vividly and luminously that it made you cry for joy?

What was that astounding paragraph?

RomanticRose · 01-26-2008, 09:01 AM

In the gray half-light of the clouded moon, the streets gleamed with water, and the palm trees had a spiky look, like a woman who has washed her hair but not yet brushed and dried it. In places, the streets were flooded; Los Angeles was built in the belief that it never rained -- as if drains and gutters would have shown a lack of faith.

The whole scene reminded Dawn of Calcutta in the monsoon, except that here the streets were empty, the rain was an inconvenience rather than a blessing. In Calcutta, she remembered, millions of people ran out into the streets just to stand and feel the rain, howling with joy; here it was regarded as an unwelcome freak of nature, a reminder to people who had fled from New York, or Chicago, or Berlin that even in Southern California, which was as far as you could flee, you couldn't escape from all the realities of life. She needed no such reminder.

Michael Korda, Queenie

RomanticRose · 01-26-2008, 09:02 AM

If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries -- the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top -- ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.
- - - Mark Twain

Matt3483 · 01-27-2008, 03:49 AM

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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.

______________________________________James Joyce, 'The Dead', Dubliners

Sam Winchester · 02-14-2008, 02:46 PM

'The fact that there have been no demands has to mean that they haven't completed their opening act.' She threw her hand up in frustration. 'So who's next? Are we going to get a seven-forty-seven impacting the World Trade Center in New York because the two pilots were neutralised on take-off from Newark or Kennedy?'

Line from the novel Blackout by John J. Nance, which was written and published in 1999, a full two years before 9/11 happened. Scary!

Sam.

enron1982 · 02-16-2008, 09:36 PM

"He thrusts his fists against the posts, and still insists he sees the ghosts."

-by guess who??

Haha, I love that line. There is by no means nothing complex about it. It's just simple yet so haunting (for me anyway). I love that line, it'll stick with me until the day I die.

I can't pick any one paragraph of prose that sticks out. i've read so much, and it wouldn't be very fair to pick just one. i've read some pretty amazing things though. In terms of modern authors, stephen king and is great, as is neil gaiman.

CodeRed · 02-17-2008, 07:59 AM

I have many, but I choose this one largely due to my current mood. It is from 'Getting Used to Dying' by Zhang Xian Liang, the chapter entitled 'Words'.

"He could be destroyed, he thought, but not that book.
Several million copies had been printed and distributed, and they were now in the hands of several million readers. That book would not be like his other works which he had personally obliterated, one by one.
So many words, written with his own hands, had been torn up with those hands. Some had been buried in paddy fields, others had been burned, still others had been shredded and thrown into the latrine. If words had souls, the whole sky would be dancing by now, whirling with little stars like a cloud of mayflies. Each little star would be transparent and able to cry out."

Buddy Glass · 02-19-2008, 08:21 PM

Molly Bloom's (does it count) "yes"-rant at the end of Ulysses.

Mr Sci Fi · 02-21-2008, 12:56 PM

It's not really the most astounding, but definitely the most interesting that I've read:

"When they unscrewed the time capsule, prepatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing." -

Harlan Ellison's "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?"

the pioneers · 03-02-2008, 03:21 PM

There's actually a few passages from this book that really stand out, but this is a definite favourite:

The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that is shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star. Though on the river it was light so that you could discern palely the lines of the crowded junks and the thick forest of their masts, in front it was a shining wall the eye could not pierce. But suddenly from the white cloud a tall, grim and massive bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand. It towered, the stronghold of a cruel and barbaric race, over the river. But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of coloured wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming castly and touched here and there by a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagent, but of an unimaginable richeness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic palace of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic and unsubstantial to be the world of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham - Chapter 33, page 81

Mishki · 03-03-2008, 02:35 AM

Two passages from The Constant Princess, by Philippa Gregory; the first from page 5, the second from page 390. Brilliant in their parallelism, and they cannot be separated.

Quote:

This is me, this little five-year-old girl, perching on the treasure chest with a face white as marble and blue eyes wide with fear, refusing to tremble, biting my lips so I don't cry out again. This is me, conceived in a camp by parents who are rivals as well as lovers, born in a moment snatched between battles in a winter of torrential floods, raised by a strong woman in armor, on campaign for all my childhood, destined to fight for my place in the world, to fight for my faith against another, to fight for my word against another's: born to fight for my name for my faith and for my throne. I am Catalina, Princess of Spain, daughter of the two greatest monarchs the world has ever known: Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon. Their names are feared from Cairo to Baghdad to Constantinople to India and beyond by all the Moors in all their many nations: Turks, Indians, Chinamen; our rivals, admirers, enemies till death. My parents' names are blessed by the Pope as the finest kings to defend the faith against the might of Islam; they are the greatest crusaders of Christendom as well as the first kings of Spain; and I am their youngest daughter, Catalina, Princess of Wales, and I will be Queen of England.

Quote:

I don't think he has the courage that I have. I think if I stand straight and tell the great lie again, that he will not dare stand straight and tell the truth.

"Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court," the usher repeats stupidly, as the echo of the doors banging behind me reverberates into the shocked courtroom, and everyone can see that I am already in court, standing like a stocky fighter before the throne.

It is me they call for, by this title. It was my dying husband's hope, my mother's wish and God's will that I should be Queen of England; and for them and for the country, I will be Queen of England until I die.

"Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, come into court!"

This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.

I step forward.

Tidus · 03-12-2008, 11:29 PM

Excerpt from Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor

This is absolutely amazing in my opinion, one of the best openings to a story I've ever read...

"But on second thought, someone who didnt know how to ask wouldn't know how to listen. And he coulda listened to them the way you been listening to us right now. Think about it: ain't nobody treally talking to you. We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999-ain't but a slim chance it's the same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: the only voice is your own. But you done just heard about the legend of Sapphira Wade, though nobody here breathes her name. You done heard it the way we know it, sitting on our porches and shelling June peas, quieting the midnight cough of a baby, taking apart the engine of a car-you done heard it without a single living soul really saying a word. Pity, though, Reema's boy couldn't listen, like you, to Cocoa and George down by them oaks-or he woulda left here with quite a story."

It's beautifully written, and incredibly deep...I absolutely love this novel...

seigfried007 · 03-21-2008, 10:00 AM

Quote:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds

Quote:

ANTONY: O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,—
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

--William Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar

Elderberry · 03-21-2008, 08:52 PM

Well, this is well nigh an impossible request, and thats why I shall enjoin!

I read this a few years ago and now that I have it out, will read again, thanks so much for the push!

From very early on in Thomas Pynchons Mason and Dixon, the last book I read, sadly and happily.....

It has become an afternoon habit for the Twins and their Sister, and what friends old and young may find their way here, to gather for another tale from their far-travel'd Uncle, the Rev Wicks Cherrycoke, who arriv'd here back in October for the funeral of a Friend of years ago,- too late for the Burial, as it prov'd,-and has linger'd as a Guest in the Home of his sister Elizabeth, the Wife, for many years, of Mr.J.Wade LeSpark, a respected Merchant, active in Town Affairs whilst in his home yet Sultan enough to convey to the Rev, tho' without ever so stipulating, that, for as long as he can keep the children amus'd, he may remain,- too much evidence of Juvenile Rampage at the wrong moment, however, and Boppo! 'twill be Out the Door with him, where waits the Winter's Block and Blade.

Elderberry · 03-21-2008, 09:07 PM

" 'Twas not too many years before the War,- what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and ultimately meaningless,- we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to seperate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independance."