Excerpts of Prose by Miscellaneous Authors

I have long had the habit of hording bits of prose that, for whatever reason, grab me when I come across them. Some of them resonate because of the lyrical phrasing, some for the concepts, some for no obvious reason at all. Here is a small sampling of my ever-growing collection of snippets....

It was raining softly, silently....I spent the whole morning coiled up in front of the fire, with my hands over it, eating nothing, motionless, just listening to the first rain of the season....I was thinking of nothing. Rolled up in a ball, like a mole in damp soil, my brain was resting. I could hear the slight movements, murmurings and nibblings of the earth, and the rain falling and the seeds swelling. I could feel the sky and the earth copulating as in primitive times when they mated like a man and woman and had children. I could hear the sea before me, all along the shore, roaring like a wild beast and lapping with its tongue to slake its thirst. I was happy.

--Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Sun blazed down on the tar-coated streets. Quiet-standing horses suddenly urinated musty urine; it splashed off the ground sending droplets flying in all directions, then in artistic fashion it scribbled away, breaking here and there into little rivulets all chasing after their pitiful bend.

--Christopher Nolan

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.

--James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Egyptians were right to make one of their gods a cat. They, the worshippers, knew that only a cat's eyes could see into their interior darkness.

--Saul Bellow

I feel like a wet seed, wild in the hot, blind earth.

--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

He lay stretched out on the bed, collecting his senses and testing the different parts of his body. Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept. He was not surprised. They demanded special attention, had always demanded it. When he had been a child, he used to stick pins into them and once had even thrust them into a fire. Now he used only cold water.

He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. he turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel.

--Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust

I never cross a bridge at night...Suppose, after all, that someone should jump in the water. One of two things -- either you do likewise to fish him out, and in cold weather you run a great risk! Or you forsake him there, and suppressed dives sometimes leave one strangely aching.

--Albert Camus, The Fall

I am exhilarated by the tremendous unimportance of my work. It is nonsense. My employers are nonsensical. The job therefore sets me free. There's nothing to it. In a way it's like getting a piece of bread from a child in return for wiggling your ears. It is childish. I am the only one in this fifty-three story building who knows how childish it is. Everybody else takes it seriously. Because this is a fifty-three story building, they think it must be serious. "This is life!" I say, this is pish, nonsense, nothing! The real world is the world of art and of thought. There is only one worthwhile sort of work, that of the imagination.

--Saul Bellow, Dangling Man

A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here of there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of 'choice' when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.

--Thomas Merton

The story is told of the absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead.

--William Barrett, Irrational Man

I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century...I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.

--Bram Stoker, Dracula

He took his little suitcase and little sack from under the table and was on his way out when he recalled that there, in the sack, were the beautiful citrons he had brought for Teresina from their hometown...He opened the top of the sack and, creating a barrier with one arm, he emptied that fresh, aromatic fruit onto the table...

He picked up the valise again and left. But on the stairs, a sense of anguished bewilderment overpowered him: alone, deserted, at night, in a big city he didn't know, far from his home; disappointed, dejected, put to shame. he made it to the street door, saw that there was a downpour of rain. He didn't have the courage to venture onto those unfamiliar streets in a rain like that. he went back in very quietly, walked back up one flight of stairs, then sat down on the first step and leaning his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, began to weep silently.

--Luigi Pirandello, Citrons from Sicily

The open wound of fear is for me the brightest light imaginable.

--Thom Jurek, Straight Fiction

One evening, when we were about ten miles from the Bay of San Blas, vast numbers of butterflies, in bands or flocks of countless myriads, extended as far as the eye could range. Even by the aid of a telescope it was not possible to see a space free from butterflies. The seamen cried out "it was snowing butterflies," and such in fact was the appearance...Before sunset a strong breeze sprung up from the north, and this must have caused tens of thousands of the butterflies and other insects to have perished.

--Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

Ultimate consciousness is the result of contemplation directed inward, while that directed outwards shows us as the goal of our existence a heap of ashes.

--Arthur Schopenhauer, On Philosophy and Its Method

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all.

--Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

From time to time I listened to myself outside of myself, it sounded like the whimpering of a young cat.

--Franz Kafka, Diaries

The spirits whose bodies lie buried in mountains of Arctic ice or beneath shifting desert sands or in unmapped potters' fields paved over by modern city streets--graves where no one pauses, where no one stands and says the name of the dead and goes silent and listens for a moment to hear the dead man or woman speak--those spirits are just as I have been, far away on a mountain in California all these years, speaking only to the sky, the sun, the moon, the cold stars above. And where there are no ears to listen, there is no story to tell. There is only a ghost bawling into the empty night.

--Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

We are like the poor spiders which, in order to live, need to weave their subtle web in some corner, we are like the poor snails which, in order to live, need to carry their frail shells on their backs, or like the poor mollusks which crave their conches at the bottom of the sea. We are spiders, snails, mollusks of a nobler race, to be sure, we wouldn't want a web, a shell, a conch, to be sure, but we would want a little world, oh yes, both to live in it and to live by it. An ideal, a feeling, a habit, an occupation--that's the little world, that's the shell of this giant snail.

--Luigi Pirandello, personal letter

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body....

--Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass