Lines I love (Part Three)

These are the ones that stay with me long after I've read the last page -previous ones here

Some lines are not just beautiful for the author's use of language and rhythm, but also for the bang-nail-right-on-the-head wisdom which resonates for ages afterwards, rattling noisily around in your head, like a butterfly in a room full of windows.

Infinitely wise:

'Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. Once we know that life is difficult -once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.'

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled

Insightfully melancholy:

'Dust had replaced her'

Brigid O'Connor, Message in a Power's bottle

'Later on in life, you expect a bit of a rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did anyway. Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been.'

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Man Booker winner 2011)

Spine-chillingly atmospheric:

'So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.'

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

On an affair:

'Gillian noticed herself taking on his (her lover's) mannerisms - the way he put a palm to his forehead when thinking or clasped his hands and rubbed them together. She felt as though he was with her, even when he wasn't. She was surprised, and oddly offended, by how logistically easy adultery was turning out to be. Damien's (her husband) apparent obliviousness angered her.'

Molly McCloskey, Protection

Wildly psychedelic:

'Frida Kahlo likes to walk in colour, but she is hard pushed on Society Street. We wander together up Sarsfield Road; 'Where is all the yellow,' she asks, 'the red?' Frida, in a floral dress and Mexican silver, draws a tidings of magpies from the sky. She sings the reds of Sarsfield Road and they bleed into veins of the town, pulsing its grey.'

Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Frida Kahlo visits Ballinasloe, from The Juno Charm.

Have you some loved ones?

(Lines, that is)