What's a good line from something you've read?

[Segland]

Here is a place for you to post an interesting phrase, sentence, or sentences from a book, magazine, article, etc. that you've read recently. It can be either fiction or nonfiction. This excludes video, film, podcasts, and other non-textual sources.

I'll start with a quote from Infinite Jest.

"Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says 'His head's shaped like a mushroom.' Day has no idea what he was referring to or talking about."

[Imperial States of Duotona]

"I understand HOW, I do not understand WHY."

This line from 1984 struck a chord in me for some reason.

[Radiatia]

Dammit Segland, you beat me to it.

I was also going to quote Infinite Jest - my line was going to be:

"Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because the numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain."

But to stop this thread turning into a David Foster Wallace circlejerk thread I'll also add this line from Aurelia - the Dream and the Life by Gerard de Nerval:

"Sleep occupies a third of our lives. He is the consolation for the hardships of our days or the penance for their pleasure; but I have never felt that sleep is rest. After an anaesthetic of a few minutes, a new life begins, detached from time and space and undoubtedly similar to the one that awaits us after death."

[Riam]

From J R R Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers:

«but to him everything beyond a certain vague distance back is a vast dark
barren but utterly fixed and determined land and time called The Dark Ages.
There are only four features in it: Norman Keeps (by which he means baronial
castles, and possibly the house of any man markedly richer than himself);
Them Jameses (meaning roughly I suppose the kings One and Two); The Squires
(a curious kind of bogey-folk); and The People. Nothing ever happened in that
land but Them Jameses shutting up The People in the Keeps (with the help of
The Squires) and there torturing them and robbing them, though they don't
appear ever to have possessed anything to be robbed of.»

~Philip Frankley~

[The Republic of Western Sol]

Master chief, what are you doing at McDonald’s

- colonel Autumn

Sir, finishing this Big Mac

- Master Chief Petty Officer John 117

From a random meme

[HISPIDA]

"A revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is!" - Fredrich Engels

i'm still not sure entirely what my stance on temporary authoritarianism is but i'll admit this line strikes a particularly resonant chord with me.

[StrayaRoos]

Whatever Nick Kygrios has done now

-Titus O' Reily-A sporting chance

[Radiatia]

"Don't think of it as extinction. Think of it as downsizing."

- Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

[Ellbonnia]

The burning of towns and villages, the retreats after battles, the blow struck at Borodino and then another retreat, the abandoning and burning of Moscow, the hunt for marauders, the cutting off of transport, the partisan war - these were all deviations from the rules. Napoleon sensed that, and from the moment when he stopped in Moscow, in the correct position of a fencer, and instead of his adversary’s sword, saw a club raised over him, he never ceased complaining to Kutuzov and the emperor Alexander that the war was being conducted against all the rules (as if there existed some sort of rules for killing people).

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Vol. IV, Pt. III, Chap. I; otherwise known as the part where Napoleon Bonaparte is in a perpetual state of sophisticated malding while the Russians go full scorched-earth on his ass.

[Radiatia]

"If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience."

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

[HISPIDA]

does "played" count if i had to read it?

"THE EXALT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE HER MURDERER!"

[Remadehome]

"don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great."

[Tuboo Shippers]

Wait who are you?

[Ellbonnia]

"If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience."

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash is pretty based, ngl

[Tuboo Shippers]

Dude, shush. I'm trying to die over here.

-The way the world turns

[Nevertopia]

"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference... in the world."
— The G-Man

[Radiatia]

"This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others."

- Don DeLillo, Falling Man

[Myrensis]

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

[Hustlertwo]

It's very simple, but the 'So it goes' from Slaughterhouse Five always sticks with me. So defeatist, yet also tinged with hope in its unblinking acceptance of what was and what is.

[Tennieeller]

"A beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel."

from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[Memer Island]

"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so then to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"
--Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[Jabberwocky]

From One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey: Nurse Ratchet's heels striking sparks on the linoleum.