an awkward [reality] break

Just as Chelsey, I don’t reblog those reblog memes. It gets too messy too quick. But I can’t ignore the first line from favourite book thing. I just can’t. But one favourite book? One?! That’s insane. There are several, there has to be several.  So here’s a few of mine.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Two days ago I decided to kill myself.

The young captain’s hands were sticky with blood on the steering wheel as he cautiously backed the jeep in a tight turn off the rutted mud track onto a patch of level snow that shone in the intermittent moonlight on the edge of the gorge, and then his left hand seemed to freeze onto the gear-shift knob after he reached down to clank the lever upinto first gear.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face  assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

“It was my first Friday night in LA,” Laurie says in her press kit for the album.

There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show.

By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a caved canal.

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Shortly after the captain mentioned they were passing over Stornaway, that it was 45 degrees below zero outside, that they were at a height of 36,000 feet, that the weather in London was cloudy and drizzly and a good morning to all, he warned that due to a high-pressure cell over Great Britain it might be a little turbulent for the next hour or so, and after signing off—Buck, Chip, Dirk,  Biff, whatever his name was, to Lucy he sounded drunk or at best half-awake—the little seatbelt sign lit up with a ding.

Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.

From the Times July 26, 1849