The well-turned phrase
Oct. 24th, 2007 10:24 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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queensthiefIn a training session for the teachers at my school, we were talking about elements of good writing (with an eye to how to teach them to children) and one of the things we agreed on was unusual words or original ways of putting things. One of my teachers is going through the Newbery Medal winners, starting with the first one, and when she got to GAY NECK: THE STORY OF A PIGEON, she was telling me one phrase that she absolutely loved: "sapphire intangibility" (describing the sky). I know there have been many phrases that have struck me in books that I've read, and I've decided to start gathering them, from other teachers and from myself, and posting them on the walls where children can read them.
So, tell me: What are some phrases or sentences (nothing longer than a sentence) that you find memorable? Mostly from Thief, QoA, and KoA, but any other books, too. (If you're like me, the minute you try to remember them you'll find you can't, but do persevere).
So, tell me: What are some phrases or sentences (nothing longer than a sentence) that you find memorable? Mostly from Thief, QoA, and KoA, but any other books, too. (If you're like me, the minute you try to remember them you'll find you can't, but do persevere).
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Date: 10/24/07 08:24 pm (UTC)"his oaths cut him like fine wire" -- out of Tithe. Actually, almost anything Holly Black, she makes excellent descriptive phrases that stick in my head.
and Mervyn Peake, talking about "turbulent toast" and "the beat of a cakey heart" (a romance poem for cake?!) was lol tastic. Mervyn Peake in general is good for overwhelmingly adjective-tastic-ness, but I say this a lot so I'll just get out of everyone else's way now XD
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Date: 10/25/07 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 04:04 am (UTC)There's a wonderfully deadpan line about Lord Groan being devoured by owls buried somewhere in the morass that is Titus Groan, but I can't remember it to save my life.
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Date: 10/26/07 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/24/07 08:35 pm (UTC)"Then in the middle of the empty air behind everybody, butterflies suddenly crossed and circled each other, their wings digging and flashing like dueler's swords in the vacuum." ~Eudora Welty, "June Recital"
Those are the two that I can think of immediately off hand. I'm a big fan of authors that take the simplest words and make something utterly beautiful out of them.
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Date: 10/25/07 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/24/07 08:40 pm (UTC)"Is it not passing brave to be a king, And drive in triumph through Persepolis?" (from Tamurlaine, by Christopher Marlowe)
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Date: 10/25/07 05:05 am (UTC)Maybe this is just because I like Persepolis. Hmm.
And some poetry
Date: 10/24/07 08:54 pm (UTC)just like a lullaby." ~a poetic translation of a German poem of which I have forgotten the title.
"One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine." ~Young
"And what if all animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
And once the soul of each, and God of All?"
~Coleridge from "The Eolian Harp"
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Date: 10/24/07 09:29 pm (UTC)"The blue mountains beyond, the out of focus world: beautiful."
-Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
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Date: 10/24/07 11:06 pm (UTC)"She glittered, but to look at her was to feel the light going out of the sky."
"A bloodshot moon burst out of the clouds, and the unicorn saw her—swollen gold, her streaming hair kindling, the cold, slow wings shaking the cage. "
"...and out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled."
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Date: 10/24/07 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/24/07 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/24/07 11:20 pm (UTC)-James Kirkpartick in a letter to his grandaughter.
The depth of emotion just floors me every time that I read it.
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Date: 10/24/07 11:51 pm (UTC)-The Perilous Guard
"The rumble of double-basses that reverberated in her abdomen was caused directly by him putting pen to paper, probably late at night as he sat in his shirt-sleeves, Signora Verdi snoring in the next room. It's a kind of male power she hasn't thought about before, a power sublimely uninterested in subjugating her or putting her to use or putting her in prison, a power whose sole aim is to make the air vibrate with pleasure."
-The Crimson Petal and the White
"I think I prefer a witch's straw matress to a saint's stones."
-The Hunting of the Last Dragon
Oh hell. Have you fallen in love with this woman, idiot boy?
Um. Yeah.
He'd been falling for days, he realized in retrospect. It was just that he's finally hit the ground.
-Komarr
Hear me, ambitious souls,
Sex is the curse of life!
-Spoon River Anthology
I could go on and on...
~Feir Dearig
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Date: 10/25/07 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 12:52 am (UTC)Um. Yeah.
He'd been falling for days, he realized in retrospect. It was just that he's finally hit the ground.
-Komarr
I love that line. And the Perilous Gard one is cool, too. What's The Crimson Petal and the White about?
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Date: 10/25/07 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 05:01 am (UTC)Or the bit where he tells Kate to go off and train a spider or teach herself Greek and be a good girl - I quite liked that line too.
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Date: 10/25/07 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 01:38 am (UTC)From "The Squire's Tale" by Gerald Morris
Date: 10/25/07 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 03:56 am (UTC)Here is a poem, which O'Brian took from naval newspapers of the day and attributed to his character Mr. Mowett:
By woe, the soul to daring action swells;
By woe, in plaintless patience it excels:
From patience, prudent clear experience springs
And traces knowledge through the course of things;
Thence hope is formed, thence fortitude, success,
Renown - whate'er men covet and caress.
But it is not the poetry that strikes me in these books, but rather the plain 'sailor's english' such as when a grizzled sailor, Preserved Killick, acting as the captain's steward proclaims the following.
"Thankee, sir. Captain's compliments and whenever Dr. Maturin has the leisure and inclination for a little more music, would welcome his company in the cabin,. Which he is a-tuning of his old fiddle this minute, sir."
This use of 'which' fascinates me, and I find myself using it in my own sentences. I love it!
The Aged Crone, more in sorrow than in anger, says...
Date: 10/25/07 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 04:59 am (UTC)Also, Attolia's wonderful acceptance at the end of QoA - "Do you know what my answer is?" "Yes." "Yes." Love this one too.
I've always been weirdly comforted by a Lymond line, when one rather severe character says to a very emotionally distraught character, "You are not going to fall." Given that he's basically in shock at this point, it proves highly effective but there's a certain weight to the phrase which makes it memorable out of context as well.
Neil Gaiman is excessively memorable - I think about half of what he writes is presented as tidy, witty epigrams. Things like, "I lost some time one...it's always the last place you look for it."
Lord Peter's "They can keep the harmony as long as they leave us the counterpoint" is at top of my list of sappy romantic quotes (well, maybe the world's greatest alternative marriage proposal is top top), which seem to be mostly what I remember.
This is a neat post - a bonus While She Knits...or at least, it's doing that to my Need to Read list. More books! More books that aren't class-related!
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Date: 10/25/07 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 05:10 am (UTC)Ellen Kushner, "Thomas the Rhymer."
All around them now was the holy forest.
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient.
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Date: 10/25/07 05:20 am (UTC)My English teacher has an amazingly HUGE vocabulary, and he uses it. The other day, for some reason we were talking about social security and the lengthening of life, yadda yadda yadda, and he used the phrase 'decrepit senescence' (What he actually said was "You know, I'm kinda looking forward to my decrepit senescence...). I don't think this is exactly the type of phrase you had in mind, but its the first one that I thought of... *shrug*
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Date: 10/25/07 11:35 am (UTC)Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
I could do Nabokov all day, but I'll just leave you that one.
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Date: 10/25/07 01:46 pm (UTC)"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
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Date: 10/25/07 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/26/07 01:38 am (UTC)(may I friend you? Since people who actually enjoy Nabokov instead of being faintly confused/irritated/disgusted should stick together)
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Date: 10/26/07 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 11:43 am (UTC)And other quotes...
"You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!"
-"Conversation Galante" by T.S. Eliot
If I started listing all the Eliot lines I liked this would be an awfully long post, but the one in my icon is another one (from "Ash Wednesday").
"Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she."
-"The Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost
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Date: 10/25/07 12:18 pm (UTC)"I will stay among the dead, singing my immense song." Ainadamar (David Henry Hwang, librettist) [I seem to like the word immense]
In Pagan's Scribe (Catherine Jinks), Lord Roland is described as moving "with a kind of controlled vigor." Just read that yesterday and oohed.
"...the pupils would stare at Mr. Brett and Mr. Brett would stare at the pupils, and each would be struggling with his private thoughts of the other, and only God Almighty knew which was nearer the truth." Leon Garfield, The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris.
"Although she didn't know it, the most dangerous part of her life was over. She was to miss it, badly." Robert Westall, Blitzcat.
And of course: "...he was normally as happy as only a fluffy-minded man with excellent health and a large income can be." P.G.Wodehouse, Leave it to Psmith.
Blitzcat
Date: 10/25/07 12:54 pm (UTC)I really liked Blitzcat! I go back and re-read every now and then. Alex liked it too (point for Books Teenage Boys Will Read).
There is another book following the fortunes of a dog in Britain during the war (WWI? Maybe WWII) which I also liked a lot, although parts were >.<, of course. It ties together the lives of 4 people in an unusual way. The book is titled Bel Ria, by Sheila Burnford.
The last line is beautiful, and poignant, but a spoiler so I can't post it.
Re: Blitzcat
Date: 10/25/07 01:01 pm (UTC)Speaking of which, I'd post something from The White Darkness if my husband hadn't taken it with him to work to read on the commute!
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Date: 10/25/07 03:08 pm (UTC)"All of this existence was composed of trivial pains and searing agonies, and each of them was yet another mask between me and the face of the eternal."
"...You should know by now that every moment of my life is spent dancing. And with every partner, I tread a different measure."
And I can't believe I'd forgotten about this one from QoA:
"Attolia stood, caught at the threshold like one who has trespassed on the mysteries and been turned to stone."
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Date: 10/25/07 06:51 pm (UTC)It's from the Blue Sword, by Robin Mckinely. it's been stuck in my head for years now.
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Date: 10/25/07 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/25/07 11:30 pm (UTC)The Crimson Petal and the White is by Michel Faber. It's set in Victorian times, and the main character (Sugar) is a prostitute. There are several contrasting love stories, and quite a bit of tragedy. I found it very interesting, and I recommend it. (It isn't like Dickens. For one thing, there's actual sex and for another there aren't enough subplots/characters.)
Another quote that I love but is a little long to share here is from Anna Karenina. "Looking at him, she physically felt her humiliation and could say nothing more. And he felt what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has deprived of life..." etc.
~Feir Dearig
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Date: 10/26/07 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 10/27/07 08:30 am (UTC)Sadly I don't have my books, being so far from home, so this might be slightly off--but in a letter to the woman he loved and never married, Keats ended something thusly:
"I will call you Venus, and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen."
I'm a sucker for the ending of Shakespeare's Marriage of True Minds sonnet, too:
"If this be error and upon me proved/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
And I also, for some reason, am extremely fond of this small and flighty bit from "The Waste Land" (Eliot):
"O O O O that Shakespeherian rag--/It's so elegant/So intelligent..."