You knew I had to include Peace Like a River quotes this week, right?  How could I possibly share a week of lovely lines and not quote Leif Enger, whose brilliant fiction often reads like poetry?  He delights me on paper and is just as wonderful in person!

“I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, golden and so clean it quivers.” 

“When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”

“Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.” 

How about this from So Brave, Young, and Handsome:

“…for his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.” 

What week of lovely lines would truly be complete without at least one poem?  Here, I present to you one of e.e. cummings’ best, with a stunning final line.  I remember re-reading this my second year of college, alone in my dorm, and the tears started just running down my face.  It was as if I were coming alive again, remembering why I loved words.

I sat on my roommate’s couch, reading and re-reading this poem.  It was like a gift.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Today is a menagerie of utter gorgeousness taken from Peter Beagle’s book The Last Unicorn.  You can’t tiptoe your way through this book without bumping into beauty every few paragraphs.

“Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.” 

“He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.” 

“Another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road – the tiny dry sound of a spider weeping.”

These flabbergast me.  He thought, or said, or sang … yes.  Yes.

Today’s lovely line comes from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  The first time I read this line, I thought I had never heard something prettier.  It still gets me every time.

“She was the book thief without the words.  Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.”

The image is pure genius.  If you can write a better line than that, I want to shake your hand.

  Do you ever encounter a line or a passage in a book that makes you shiver with delight, one that bends your mind, or (if you’re a writer) one that makes you so envious you could scream?  In all my years of reading, I have encountered some lines that just take my breath away every time I read them.  This week, I’m going to share them with you.

Today’s lines come from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.

“As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else – something he vaguely called the “Normal” – apparently existed…. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal.”

Mmm … all those k-sounds!  Rooks cawing at Cure Hardy.  LOVE.

How about this:

“great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth”

That sounded like castles.  I’m in love.

Jack Lewis, you are my hero.