Lines I Love (Part Two)

Some more (part one is here ) of those lines that stay with me long after I've turned the last page.
Lines holding a sentiment that lodges in my head.
Lines that make me wish I knew the author personally, so I could tell her/him just how much their creation resonates with me.
Lines that make me wish I was the one who wrote them.

Insightful:
The effect of a death on mundanities:
There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all.

The dynamic of a large family:
There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invitied. There is a mysterious sister.......the great thing about being dragged up is that there is no one to blame. We are entirely free range."

The heroine's daughter at the funeral:
Her face is full of unshed tears.

Anne Enright's (Booker prize winning) The Gathering







Spine-chillingly tense:
In the voice of a mentally brittle nanny.
Alina loved the baby. She loved everything about the baby. The tiny boyness of him, the way his legs kicked whenever he looked up at her....even when he cried, when he screamed, she was very happy. But he did not cry very often. He was almost a perfect baby.

Roddy Doyle's  The Pram






Forgiveness:
The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed: and the flame of resentment extinguished.

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.   On the heroine's return to Gateshead, her former home, where she had been cruelly treated by her relatives.






Irresistible sensuousness:
There was a tender but energetic adhocery to our sex, the way there is when young people are not embarrassed by their bodies-what they look like and what they want. Kissing was urgent yet careful, luminous and drinklessly drunk. He hovered-quivering, tense and flight bound - I bucked, humped and arced, a dancer in a sea lion suit. Afterward, he would sometimes say, "That was one for the scrapbook!"

Lorrie Moore's    A Gate at the Stairs.


And finally a quote within a quote:

Anxiety:

A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less.

Quoted by Francine Prose in Reading like a writer from "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin.


Have you lines you love?