My Favorite Paragraphs

 Fight Club "And in the basement of the Armory Bar, Tyler Durden slips to the floor in a warm jumble. Tyler Durden, the great, who was perfect for one moment, and who said that a moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection." (Published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. 1996. Page 201)

 The Mezzanine "And this was when I realized abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said "actually" too much. I was the sort of person who sat in subway cars and thought about buttering toast --- buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heart-blimped forms of raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I ...

Like Life From the short story "Joy." And she did. Shen went the following Thursday and had dinner with Bridey and Bridey's husband, who was a big gentle man who did consulting work for computer companies. He was wearing a shirt printed with seahorses, like her ex-lover the toymaker had worn when he had come east to visit, one final weekend, for old times' sake. It had been a beautiful shirt, soft as pajamas, and he'd worn it when they had driven that Sunday, out past the pumpkin fairs, to the state line, to view the Mississippi. The river had rushed by them, beneath them, a clayey green, a deep, deep khaki.  She had touched the shirt, held on to it, in this lunarscape of scrub oaks and jack pines, in this place that had once at the start of the world been entirely under water and now just had winds, it was good to have a river cutting through, breaking up the land. In the distance, past a valley dalmatianed with birches, these wee larger trees, cedars and goldeni...

 The Great Gasby "We drank in long greedy swallows." (Published by Charles Scribner & Son, 1953 Page 148, originally published 1925)  

 Back in the 1990's, Yahoo rolled out an amazing tool.  It was called Geocities.  You could publish your own websites, imagine that!  Nowadays, this is no big deal, but in the 1990's, this was mind blowing. It was free as well. I used to have a really great website for my favorite paragraphs.  I read a lot, more back then, so every time I came across a paragraph I loved, in fiction usually, I added it to my web site. I must had about 50 paragraphs posted ranging from Herman Hesse, Henry Miller and Douglas Adams.   It got away from me. Life happened. In 2009, I received an email that Geocities was going away.  I need to back up my website. I did not and I lost it.  I don't know what going with me in 2009. I was probably very busy with work, maybe I was depressed.  I just can't explain it.  No excuses. It is about time I resurrect this project.  I am starting with Hemingway and Conrad because those are the two works of fiction th...

The Secret Agent "Meanwhile, the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to a waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner --- one of those traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a perspective of mirrors and white napery: without air but with an atmosphere of their own --- an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the most pressing of its miserable necessities. In this immoral atmosphere the Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to lose some more of his identity.  He had a sense of loneliness, of evil freedom. It was rather pleasant. When, after paying for his short meal, he stood up and waited for his change, he saw himself in the sheet of glass, and was struck by his foreign appearance. He contemplated his own image with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze, then by sudden inspiration raised the collar of his jacket. This arrangement appeared to him commendable, and he completed it by giving an upward...

For Whom the Bell Tolls Opening paragraph of chapter nine: "They stood in the mouth of the cave and watched them. The bombers were high now in fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. They  are  shaped like sharks, Robert Jordan thought, the wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of  their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom."  (Charles Scribner & Son: page 96, published 1968 , originally published 1940)