Is there any better passage in literature than the opening to Lolita?
Legitimate question, /lit/. I'm currently reading Lolita and that opening sent shivers down my spine with how beautifully written it is.
What seriously competes with this? I want to know.
> Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
ITT: Your favourite passages in literature / passages that are better than the opening to Lolita.
>>7524897
Ahab's speech to the crew revealing that they will go after Moby-Dick
Molly Bloom's soliloquy
The comparison between shit and a negro's dick in Gravity's Rainbow during the BDSM coprophilia scene. Not even kidding for the sake of edge, Pynchon really has a talent for the grotesque and abstract metaphors and Gravity's Rainbow is host to many grotesque moments that are injected with surprising humour and beauty.
The whole speech in the Trial that goes over how the court system works, or something.
The passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen is sick in bed. I've never been impacted so much by language in all my life.
>>7524902
My favorite part of Moby-Dick, prose-wise, was Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah.
>>7524915
that sermon was lovely as well
speaking of Portrait and sermons, that one sermon in Portrait on hell and sin was fucking astounding. I remember being blown away and at that moment knowing that Joyce was my favorite author
>>7524915
>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
when pastor described eternity. Also tornents of hell, it was really disgusting
Or cock/queer ambiguity passage in chapter one. Joyce is a amazing writer
>>7524922
i'm reading Moby-Dick right now, 2/3 of the way done
it's incredible. More than anything i've read, it's this perfect point where everything prior is incorporated (Paradise Lost, Bible, historical/geological/scientific info of the time/references to myths) and the hints of the future (heavy modernist thought, stabs at God and religion being made, animal rights, heavy irony like the chapter "THE HONOR IN WHALING" following a chapter where they slaughter an old, crippled whale...)
Moby-Dick is phenomenal
A tale of two cities had by far the most impressive and memorable opening in all of literature.
The opening to lolita, while good, is creepy.
>>7524922
oh and the Trial is a mindfuck of perfection
really a beautiful piece of literature
>>7524935
Of course, no doubt that Lolita is just generally quite unnerving, especially with how human and rational Humbert actually is, but that opening passage had me instantly hooked. I had to re-read it a few times just to get it out of my system.
Joyce? Melville? Not to mention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM
>>7524932
Agreed, top tier. Moby Dick is a book about everything, it is like the Bible.
>>7524897
Not sure what it's like in the original German, but I found the Faith, Hope, Love chapter from the Tim Drum pretty amazing.
>>7524939
the castle doesn't have as complete of a narrative due to kafkas premature death but i think its got a few chapters that easily outstrip the trial, much like the pale king when stacked up against infinite jest
The entire book is like this. Probably one of the most beautiful prose pieces in the english language
>>7524925
best description of hell ive ever heard. gave me goose bumps desu
>>7524897
Huge amount of stuff written in other languages than English. Just go through Bible blooks, Illiad, Odyssey, plays...
Modern english truly is shitty as poetic language. Another proof is Lolita itself. It simply couldn't have been written by native English speaker. It took a Slav to go through it with outside brain.
>>7524932
Its still gay and autistic
>>7524935
>The opening to lolita, while good, is creepy.
ugh
Lolita's opening, while well crafted, is ultimately masturbatory. As befits the subject matter. To call it the best passage in all of literature, however, reveals one as a huge wanker.
>>7525054
I'd say it reveals one as someone who hasn't read enough to come have come across something better, particularly because it is entry level literature
>>7524897
I liked the bit in Blood Meridian where the Kid and the military company were walking across the desert, and when the Kid was alone walking on top of the snowy mountain
>>7525054
OP here: please inform me of better passages, anon. It is why I started this thread, as I'm currently reading Lolita and I find the prose pretty and I want to see what others suggest/recommend in regards to amazing prose. I didn't intend to come off as a "huge wanker," anon, but I guess it must seem like I've yet to read better works.
Paradise Lost has lots.
"They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way."
>>7525122
Literally the next paragraph in Lolita is better
>'I shall edge behind them,’ said Rhoda, ‘as if I saw someone I know. But I know no one. I shall twitch the curtain and look at the moon. Draughts of oblivion shall quench my agitation. The door opens; the tiger leaps. The door opens; terror rushes in; terror upon terror, pursuing me. Let me visit furtively the treasures I have laid apart. Pools lie on the other side of the world reflecting marble columns. The swallow dips her wing in dark pools. But here the door opens and people come; they come towards me. Throwing faint smiles to mask their cruelty, their indifference, they seize me. The swallow dips her wings; the moon rides through the blue seas alone. I must take this hand; I must answer. But what answer shall I give? I am thrust back to stand burning in this clumsy, this ill-fitting body, to receive the shafts of his indifference and his scorn, I who long for marble columns and pools on the other side of the world where the swallow dips her wings.’
>‘Night has wheeled a little further over the chimney-pots. I see out of the window over his shoulder some unembarrassed cat, not drowned in light, not trapped in silk, free to pause, to stretch, and to move again. I hate all details of the individual life. But I am fixed here to listen. An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries. A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule pierce me. I, who could beat my breast against the storm and let the hail choke me joyfully, am pinned down here; am exposed. The tiger leaps. Tongues with their whips are upon me. Mobile, incessant, they flicker over me. I must prevaricate and fence them off with lies. What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat? I think of names on boxes; of mothers from whose wide knees skirts descend; of glades where the many-backed steep hills come down. Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave, dealing her looks adroitly here and there, saying this, saying that, with truth. But I lie; I prevaricate.
>>7525139
It's great, of course. I love that whole opening section, but what stuck out with the very first segment was how it playfully expressed phonology. Something so simple as pronouncing the title and it just had me hooked.
>>7525143
>‘Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. What then is the knowledge that Jinny has as she dances; the assurance that Susan has as, stooping quietly beneath the lamplight, she draws the white cotton through the eye of her needle? They say, Yes; they say, No; they bring their fists down with a bang on the table. But I doubt; I tremble; I see the wild thorn tree shake its shadow in the desert.
>‘Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is, then, a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing-room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty. The lovers crouch under the plane tree. The policeman stands sentinel at the corner. A man passes. There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.
>>7525129
> Som natural tears they drop'd, but wiped them soon
Another book I need to read in the new year.
>>7524897
The entirety of The Tunnel by Gass.
>no one has posted the last page of The Dead yet
/lit/ wtf step your game up
>>7524897
if a du like vlad posted in a critique thread niggas would str8 be callin it purple prose looooooooooooool rt
The Lady with the Dog by Chekhov
>At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings -- the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky -- Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.
>>7524897
>the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap
Non-Native speaker here, what does this mean?
I also thought the opening / first page was really nice, but I stopped so I can revisit the book later to better appreciate it. Even without understanding the stuff that was written I could tell that it had some really nice prose though.
Call me pleb but I really liked this.
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”
>>7525239
> what does this mean?
The movement your tongue makes when saying "Lolita" is like it's taking steps towards your teeth
>>7525251
It sounds very natural and colloquial so I guess it's effective in what it's attempting.
>>7524897
You are now aware that the cover OP posted is the corner of two walls and a ceiling, but was also selected for its resemblance to two thighs and a mons pubis.
>>7525406
>points out something self evident
>everyone whos not brain dead already realizes it
>still thinks he's being clever/edgy
back to reddit with you
Guys help me with choosing best passage from Illiad. There is a lot of beautiful stuff, personally i like dialogue between Hector and Andromecha
>>7525419
Just wait. You'll see.
>>7525406
Oh shit. I knew it was a ceiling and walls but now I can't help but see the thighs
>>7525030
>modern english isnt a poetic language
>lolita was only good cos written by a non-english language in english
Nigga what, you need to either commit to one argument or make a new one that incorporates both, otherwise this doesnt really make sense as an argument.
>>7525251
>I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.
D R O P P E D
R
O
P
P
E
D
"What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.
The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.
And then the man has passed by and the little girl's face is quite bright."
>>7525031
What a thoughtful and original criticism.
>>7524935
That entire first chapter is remarkable.
I'd also add any of the major soliloquies from Hamlet.
>>7525251
Maybe you're a pleb but I'll be one with you I've always loved this
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
>>7525576
What this from?
>>7524935
A Tale of Two Cities has both the best opening, and best closing passage in all of literature.
How can one book be so based?
>>7525720
>Dickens
>Anything but complete garbage
>>7525738
name a book with a better combo of opening+closing passages
protip: you can't
He knew she was there by the joy and terror that gripped his heard. She stood talking to a woman at the opposite end of the rink. There was apparently nothing striking about her dress or her attitude: but Levin found it as easy to recognize her in that crowd of people as a rose among nettles. Everything became bright in her presence. She was the smile that brightened everything around her. "Can I really go down onto the ice and go up to her?" he thought. The spot where she stood seemed to him an unapproachable sanctuary, and there was one moment when he nearly went away, so terrified was he. He had to make an effort and reason with himself that all sorts of people were walking near her and and that he himself might have come to skate there. He went down, trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.
She lay for a long time without stirring and with wide-open eyes, the glitter of which she fancied she could herself see in the darkness.
>>7525742
Blood Meridian
>>7525717
Kafka
>>7525744
>memeing this hard
bet you're american
>>7525738
At his best Dickens has some of the prose in the English language and was highly subversive. At his worst, his work is the most painfully sentimental schlock the world has ever known.
>>7525751
>Thinking that the work of the most uninspired author in Britain is a mastery of the English language
wew
Also: Heart of Darkness
>>7525738
When Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your life.
>>7525766
>implying he didn't write some of the best prose in the english language
tolstoy's favourite book was david copperfield and said dickens was his greatest influence
>>7525788
>Not the gospels
ok
Besides, Tolstoy was a superior author in every imaginable sense imho
>>7524897
Lolita's and One Hundred Years of Solitude are my favorites
> Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
>>7525766
>most uninspired author in Britain
At times, sure, but t others he captured his age perfectly. He was the best of Writers, he was the worst of writers.
>>7524897
The start of 1934 by Moravia is good, not the best but it's memorable.
"Is it possible to live in despair and not wish for death?"
>>7524897
>>7525406
no. it's little girl panties, you fucking moron.
...but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
>>7525030
Nabokov grew up speaking three languages and could read and write in English before Russian. Don't be stupid.
>He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone-flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.
>The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cuts the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.
I love how the Fountainhead opens. It feels like you are standing a god among men in front of the raw world
>>7526688
you got baited hard
>>7525717
It's not "from" anything. It's the entirety of Kafka's Absent-minded Window-gazing.
>>7526892
>>7525160
>all of A Painful Case
>>7524897
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
also the biblical passage with "they gnawed their tongues because of the pain" always gave me a lit boner
“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”
>>7526913
Dislike Rand, but you can't hate her bold style.
>>7526972
I remember reading that for the first time... God damn McCarthy is depressing
>>7526989
if by bold you mean awkward and artificial sure
>>7525119
The ending of Blood Meridian did it for me. I ended up rereading it several times. Fantastic book.
>>7527006
How is it that you see it as awkward and artificial? Genuinely curious
>>7524902
I read moby dick in translation when I was 9 or 10, is it worth reading again?
>>7527013
he really captures the essential, primordial nature of human violence and cruelty like nobody else. blood meridian is a terrifying book.
>>7527015
>[A frozen explosion] of granite burst] in flight] to the sky] over motionless water.]]]]]
indulgent and self conscious. if you're gonna wank like this you don't insult the reader by blowing your load before putting it in. details: burst is a shitty verb here, and the metaphor describing the rocks is inconsistent (frozen but in flight). motionless is out of register, especially after 'frozen'.
>The water seemed immovable, the stone-flowing.
gee thanks ayn, you're not being redundant or anything. i bet it wont get grating.
>The stone had the stillness
ffs
>one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion
jesus christ you're already in the middle of a metaphor and you can't even make the thought clear without going one level deeper into abstraction. thanks for telling us again about the stillness though i didn't really get it the last four times.
the next paragraph is ok
>>7527040
what, the stone had stillness? you're really going to make fun of that? legitimately a beautiful line. go back to reading junk like twilight. seriously.
>>7527051
>the stone had stillness
the ffs is about the redundancy of the image.
>legitimately a beautiful line.
the metaphor would have been ok if she hadn't been beating you senseless with the idea four times in the same paragraph.
> go back to reading junk like twilight.
guess i got baited. no one has that much a lack of self-awareness.
>>7527062
don't you get it? the redundancy is the unpliable nature of what is and what ought! the currency of time is only defined by what is static, and when your perception is fluid, then nothing has purpose or permanence! if you don't repeat it, it's not clear that when you look away it won't still be there!
>>7524925
the hellfire speech in portrait is one of the most penetrating things I've ever read.
>>7525089
>look into this tangle of thorns
the description of a corrupt life as a "tangle of thorns" is so revealing for not only the past of Humbert Humbert, but for the present. His self-reflexive life, with knowledge of his past sins, is shown, but it is presented objectively like a psychopath, like he doesnt feel remorse for his actions and is only talking about them as statements of fact.
Such a good opening, I dont knock anyone for praising it.
