'We may call Euridice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day"

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

quote:

---

BlueShift wrote:
The opening to Christopher Brookmyre's One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

---

Only marginally better is the opening chapter of Quite Ugly One Morning by said author:

This extract is actually the first TWO chapters....

"every day i come to work is worse than the last. That means every time you see me, it is the worst day of my life."

- The last time i looked there were more sheep than wolves.
- The last time you looked would be just that, the last time you looked.

»God is a Bullet« by Boston Teran.

a selection of nice quotes that i have to hand, because i'm funny like that -

"Her voice is full of the sexual charisma of old, alien, made-up things"
-light - m. john harrison

"Helen Of Troy would have looked out of place. 'What's Helen of Troy doing in here?' some longshoresman woulad have asked. He wouldn't have understood"
-a confederate general in big sur - richard brautigan

"The East Village is like any other village, except that it's seedier, funkier, and more violent. It is inhabited largely by witches, homosexuals, and drug addicts, and, of course, the few bad apples that you'd find in most any community."
-musical chairs - kinky friedman

"They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them."
-the crying of lot 49 - thomas pynchon

"The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel."

Remotepush, I've got a few from Crying as well:

"What voices overheard,
flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed
among the wallpaper's stained foliage,
candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him,
prefiguring the cigarette
he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking,
thus to end
among the flaming, secret salts
held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a matress
that could keep vestiges
of every nightmare sweat,
helpless overflowing bladder,
viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream,
like the memory bank
to the computer of the lost?"

-Chapter 5

[that was not spaced out in the book. I spaced it because un-spaced it is difficult to absorb thoroughly as one straight paragraph-sentence.]

and

"But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which, in whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen?"

-Chapter 6

and [alone in a gay bar in SF]

"Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you."

-Chapter 5

quote:

---

A baby almost killed me as I walked to work one morning. By passing beneath a bus shelter's roof at the ordained moment I lived to tell my tale. With strangers surrounding me I looked at what remained. Laughter from heaven made us lift our eyes skyward. The baby's mother lowered her arms and leaned out her wondow. Without applause her audience drifted off, seeking crumbs in the gutters of this city of God. Xerox shingles covered the shelter's remaining glass pane, and the largest read: Want to be crucified. Have own nails. Leave message on machine. The fringe of numbers along the ad's hem had been stripped away...

---

Opening passage of Jack Womack's Heathern

'Let me tell you about this guy,' said Harvey pointing a thumb at me. 'The first time I ever saw him was in Frankfurt. He was sitting in a new white Jensen sports car that was covered in mud, with a sensational blonde, sensational. He was wearing very old clothes, smoking a Gauloise cigarette and listening to a Beethoven quartet on the car radio, and I thought, "Oh boy, just how many ways can you be a snob simultaneously." ...

That sounds fun. What's it from?

"The Billion Dollar Brain" by Len Deighton

my dad loved deighton. i only read game set & match i think.

quote:

---

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was fill of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

---

Opening to Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"

It could never have been anything else, could it?

quote:

---

Originally posted by synesthesia:
"The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel."

---

I believe it's "The sky over the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

But I guess we all remember the other way.

quote:

---

Originally posted by hurtstotouchfire:
Remotepush, I've got a few from Crying as well:
"Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you."

-Chapter 5

---

-yeah i particularly remember that one, and i know what you mean about spacing, sometimes things need to be broken up in that manner. i just loved that whole long night where she wondered, hoping to prove that it was all coincidence but instead being sucked into this madness.

another quote from early on -

"much of the revelation was to come from the stamp collection Pierce had left,
his substitute for her -
thousands of little coloured windows
into deep vistas of space and time:
savannahs teeming with elands and gazelles,
galleons sailing west into the void,
Hitler heads,
sunsets,
cedars of Lebanon,
allegorical faces that never were,
he could spend hours peering into each one,
ignoring her."

"'In a society of criminals,' Schaeffer offered, 'the innocent men goes to jail.'"

PKD, Solar Lottery

pardon me this, it's impossible to quote a small section..

"-he's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of your common or garden...you know...There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom.

Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The awful disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle's Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs purefoy.
He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.
-That I had, he said, pushing it by.
The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.
-Them are two good ones, he said.
Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.
On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.
Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles.
Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.
He opened it. Thought so.
A woman's voice behind the dingy curtain.
No: she wouldn't like that much. Got her it once.
He read the other title: Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.
He read where his finger opened.
-All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wonderous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!
Yes. This. Here. Try.
-Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptious kiss while his hands felt for the opulant curves inside her deshabille.
Yes. Take this. The end.
-You are late, he spoke hoarsly, eyeing her with a suspicious glare. The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. And imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.
Mr Bloom read again: The beautiful woman...
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrels arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (For him! For Raoul!). Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint). Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulphur dung of lions!
Young! Young!"

well, as noted in this months reading thread, i am working my way through the transmetropolitan collection - so here are two quotes i've picked out, pretty long, but effective....

"I hear Kodo drumming from the Japanese island a few blocks south: the sound of a village gathering its people home for the night. Laughter up the street, as nigh club gates melt open. The taste of a city cigarette, smooth and fat. Angels 8 isn’t far. A brief clatter of gun-fire. The sound of a couple having sex that they’ve waited the whole day for. The jump of caffeine in my fingers, the crackle of intelligence enhancers in my head. There’ll be a taxi for me at the end of the street, because that’s just the way things are. City under my feet. Home again.
-Transmetropolitan: Back On The Streets.
-Spider Jerusalem is back in town and getting back into the city’s vibe.


“Fuck you! You traded on fear and hate and snaked your way into a place where you could make your wet dreams come true, by turning America into a fucking third world country that bleeds money and exports fuck all but shit television and transplantable organs, because you killed medical aid and created a culture of crime and presided over America becoming the murder capital of the world because you though it was fucking funny, you piece of shit, and that’s just the start of your trail of shit and my hate and I couldn’t resist being locked in a room with you pigfucker”

“What is it that makes you hate me so much Jerusalem?”

“Your represent and encourage the worst in people. You’re not interested in anything other than having the presidency, but you’re not interested in actually being a president. You don’t believe in anything”

“Bull-shit. I said before: just because you don’t like what I believe in, doesn’t mean I have no beliefs.”

“Don’t give me that. You don’t…”

“Shut up. You call me a liar to my face again, I’ll fucking glass you”

-Transmetropolitan: The New Scum
-Spider Jerusalem invited to a personal interview with the incumbent president he nick-named “the beast”

The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

YES, MR. KELLY! WAS IT ABOUT ANYTHING?

"It should never be forgotten that during all the time we were studying bats, bats had a unique opportunity to study us."