A phrase that caught your eye.

[Steerpike]

I am reading Joseph Conrad's Victory, and he is describing a man who is known to be a gossip. He describes the individual as a large man of the Teutonic persuasion "with an ungovernable tongue that must have operated on a pivot."

The part in quotes cracked me up.

Have the rest of you come across any short bits of prose lately that made you chuckle or otherwise caught your attention?

[JohnKPatterson]

"Cara went for a knife before I even hit the floor. As I landed in a wary crouch, she advanced around the bed in nothing but her undertunic, fire in her eyes and a good seven inches of steel shining in one hand. Shit. So much for the good mood. Time to talk fast."

~The Whitefire Crossing, by Courtney Schafer

[Steerpike]

Nice one, John K.

I'll pull another one from Conrad. The main character is listening to an orchestra at a dive hotel in the tropics. The orchestra is run by a German man who has died his hair and beard black and calls himself Zangiacomo in the hope people will think he is Italian. The band is terrible. Conrad writes:

"The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy."

[Lorna]

'At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded
by the sons of men.'
-Beowulf

[JonSnow]

“My sister has mistaken me for a mushroom. She keeps me in the dark and feeds me shit.” - Tyrion Lannister

[psychotick]

Hi,

Not recently, but Hitchikers is always brilliant.

For instance, describing the Vogon destructor fleet - "- they hovered there in exactly the same way that bricks don't."

Awesome!

Cheers, Greg.

[Steerpike]

Nice one, guys. I agree re: Hitchhiker's, Greg. Lots of great ones there.

I guess I should go with Peake:

"If ever man stalked man, Flay stalked Swelter. It is to be doubted whether, when compared with the angular motions of Mr. Flay, any man on earth could claim to stalk at all. He would have to do it with another word."

[JCFarnham]

Not recently, but Hitchikers is always brilliant..

If you can't find a fabulous turn of phrase in those books then you need to try harder right? hehe

[Caged Maiden]

"The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if anyone of us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves."

The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde

[Telcontar]

One that comes most quickly to mind is from Tolkien (surprise surprise), speaking of Shelob:

"An evil thing in spider form... the last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world."

Like much of Tolkien, it carries the weight of the history of Middle-Earth behind it. Reading it when I was ten, I immediately burned to know who/what the hell Ungoliant was (which I soon found out, when I read the Silmarillion) and I loved the poetry of the sentence. I admit to having stolen and rephrased it a bit at some point.