Ten Great Lines from Literature
By OFW editor: Katrina Monroe
Published: September 12, 2013
If you’re like me, you have a journal. And in that journal is a collection of lines, dialogue, or whole paragraphs you’ve read that have struck you as truly great feats of word manipulation. Collections abound with great first lines and great last lines because it is these lines that can make or break a novel. But what about that vast middle? The chasm of darkness that writers lose themselves in? Some of the greatest lines are borne in that hell. Here are a few of my favorites.
From American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
“And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.”
From The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
“Greeks are moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your daughter does it – that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be so happy all the time.”
From White Oleander by Janet Finch
“The nearest I’d come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?”
From Invisible Monster by Chuck Palahniuk
“No matter how much you think you love someone, you’ll always step back when the pool of their blood edges too close.”
From In One Person by John Irving
“I was mortally tired; it was exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are, and Elaine’s bra was summoning me to my bed.”
From This is Where I Leave You by Johnathan Tropper
“I’ve never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that split second of nothingness right before the pain catches up with the bullet.”
From Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
“Five A.M. That’s the best time, when the clicking of your heels on the sidewalk sounds illicit.”
From Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
“I felt a brick black wobble of sex pulse across the six charged inches that separated her left thigh from my right.”
From The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
“He had ears that looked like they had been chewed off and spit back on his head.”
From The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
“Rose Saxon, the Queen of romance comics, was at her drawing board in the garage in her house in Bloomington, NY, when her husband phoned from the city to say that, if it was all right with her, he would be bringing home the love of her life, whom she had all but given up for dead.”
0 Comments
Login/Register to leave a comment, or Login using 
Post Comments
No Comment Found.
