In a couple weeks, NaNoWriMo takes over my free time. By that, I mean, I begin my heavy ‘throwing down a bunch of meaningless words’ season. It’s yet another attempt of mine to try to write a fictional novel by simply writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Impossible you say? Well, I knocked that out twice the last two years – but that didn’t come with a fair bit of panic before hand. Over the next week, I need to get a plot together, layout a plan of action, and practice getting as many words down as possible so the speed doesn’t catch me off guard. Right now, I just want to get inspiration, so it made me think of all the great lines of prose I have seen … and how so many of them are just stand-alone good, yet also stand alone strange. That gave me an idea … write a blog post using those great lines, but leave them without an explanation at all. I know … if there is one thing this blog is about it is over explaining; I mean, look at me, I just spent 200 words saying ‘no explanation will be needed’.
But then again, what over explaining no explanation needed without a set of rules:
- All these lines are from books or television, stuff I like. It won’t include movies, because I am working on a completely different list that I need those quotes for.
- They are stand along good. It’s not a quote that the context is important, they just exist with depth, meaning, or fun. You may know the context, but you don’t have to … that’s the point
- I’ll name the source, but not the context.
- This is just a random list on what I can remember today; not some ‘best of all time’ because that may come later
So here we go … in order of ‘None of your business what order it is in’ here is:
The Top-16ish Lines of Prose with No Further Explanation:
- “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
― Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - “Metaphors are lies.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - “Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian - “Sometimes science is more art than science”
― Rick Sanchez, Rick & Morty - “The doc here has been telling me that you have some great stories. I wouldn’t mind hearing one sometime.””Oh what the hell. Back in ’68; I don’t like you. The end.”
“- J.D. & Dr. Kelso, Scrubs - “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try.”
― Homer Simpson, The Simpsons - “You’re so beautiful you should be embalmed”
― Steve Taylor, Coupling - “You can swallow a pint of blood before you get sick.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club - “Life is but an endless series of missed opportunities, some involving Pottery Barn.”
― BoJack Horseman, BoJack Horseman - “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita - “Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen - “It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch - “Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”― Tana French, Broken Harbour
- “The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist - “Her lips said ‘No,” but her eyes said ‘read my lips.'”
― Niles Crane, Frasier(And finally we will end with where we started)
- “In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The Bear Feed 