Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

They fell pregnant one by one. He beat them. The wife cried and cried. There were three births that summer. The house was filling up, both rooms, the trailer. People were sleeping everywhere. One brought home what she said was a husband but he only stayed a day or two and they never saw him again. The twelve year old began to swell. The air grew close. Grew rank and fetid. He found a pile of rags in a corner. Small lumps of yellow shit wrapped up and laid by. One day in the woods and kuzu jungles on the far side of the dump he came across two figures humping away. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of the girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through th ewoods hauling up his britches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He overbalanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees and he waas mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Oooh.
Did he dump a load in you?
No.
He pulled it out and gripped it and squirted his jissom on her thigh. Goddamn you, he said. He rose and hesited up his overalls and lumbered off toward the dump like a bear.

Toni Morrison, from The Bluest Eye

And now when I see her searching the garbage--for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late.

Michael Cunningham, from The Hours

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously priviledged, with a simple errand to run. She, Clarissa Vaughan, an ordinary person (at this age, why bother trying to deny it?), has flowers to buy and a party to give.

Flannery O'Connor, from "Enoch and the Gorilla"

Enoch was usually thinking of something else at the moment that Fate began drawing back her leg to kick him. When he was four years old, his father had brought home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, "A NUTTY SURPRISE!" When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger. He stood there and read the poster twice through carefully. To his mind, the chance to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence.

Aimee Bender, from "The Rememberer"

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don't know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It's been a month and now he's a sea turtle.

I keep him on the counter, in a glass baking pan filled with salt water.

James Joyce, from "The Dead"

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself toward any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a gray impalpable world: the sold world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling fainly through the universe and fainly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Larry McMurtry, the opening to "The Last Picture Show."

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn't that that made him feel so strange and along. It was just the look of the town.
There was only one car parked on the courthouse square--the nightwatchman's old white Nash. A cold norther was singing in off the plains, swirling long ribbons of dust down Main Street, the only street in Thalia with businesses on it. Sonny's pickup was a '41 Chevrolet, not at its best on cold mornings. In front of the picture show it coughed out and had to be choked for a while, but then it started again and jerked its way to the red light, blowing out spumes of white exhaust that the wind whipped away.
At the red light, he started to turn south toward the all-night cafe, but when he looked north to see if anyone was coming he turned that way instead. No one at all was coming but he saw his young friend Billy headed out. He had his broom and was sweeping right down the middle of the highway into the gusting wind. Billy lived at the poolhall with Sam the Lion, and sweeping was all he really knew how to do. The only trouble was that he overdid it. He swept out the poolhall in the mornings, the cafe in the afternoons, and the picture show at night, and always, unless someone specifically told him to stop, he just kept sweeping, down the sidewalk, on through the town, sometimes one way and sometimes another, sweeping happily on until someone noticed him and brought him back to the poolhall.
Sonny drove up beside him and honked. Billy quit sweeping at once and got in the pickup. He was a stocky boy, not very smart, but perfectly friendly; picking him up made Sonny feel less lonesome. If Billy was out, the poolhall must be open, and when the poolhall was open he was never lonesome. One of the nice things about living in Thalia was that the poolhall was often open by 6:30 or 7:00 A.M., the reason being that Sam the Lion, who owned it, was a very bad sleeper.

Don DeLillo, from Underworld

Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in wooly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and trying to get up and scatter. A couple stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the steets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way the runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

Nabokov, from Lolita

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.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lolita in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About at many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Marilynne Robinson

If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the nineteenth-century Americans-- Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language and of consciousness-- bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, rummaging through the exotic and recondite, setting promethean doubts to hymn tunes, refining popular magazine tales into arabesques, pondering bean fields, celebrating the float and odor of hair, always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed that everything can be apprehended truly when it is seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, hence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation-- true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies.
Of course there are any number of ways to write and things to write about, and the world is richer for the fact. I happen to have read these old aunts and uncles at an impressionable age, and so I will always answer to them in my mind.

Richard Ford, from The Sportswriter

As I've said, life has only one certain closure. It is possible to love someone, and no one else, and still not live with that one person or even see her. Anything or anyone who says different is a liar or a sentimentalist or worse. It is possible to be married, to divorce, then to come back together with a whole new set of understandings that you'd never have liked or even understood before in your earlier life, but that to your surprise now seems absolutely perfect. The only truth that can never be a lie, let me tell you, is life itself-- the thing that happens.

Ben Marcus, from "The Father Costume"

My father's costumes were gray and long and of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man's body. He preferred not to move. He was not one for excursions. My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother's kill hole out on the back platform.

At most, my father would throw handfuls of our mother's fabrics in the morning and study how they fell, diagrams in cloth that could have meant anything. His body was hunched and foreign. He grimaced with each gesture, his face often partially adorned with cotton bracings. When the disarray proved baffling to him, he brought in my brother for consultations. I sat on the bench and watched them crouch at their work. I could not read fabric. I had a language problem. My brother spoke a language called Forecast. It consisted of sounds he barked into a stippled leather box. When my father wrapped my brother's hands in cotton waffling, my brother could tap out a low-altitude language on the floor, short thuds of speech that my father held his listening jar to. On the short nights when the sky was stretched too tight and the birds struck against it like pebbles on our roof, my brother slept off his Forecast expulsions in a sling hanging from our door. He cried softly inside his mesh bag while I dotted our windowsills with listening utensils, in case a message came in the night.

Emerson, from "Self-Reliance and Other Essays"

As to the Miracle, too, of poetry. There is truly but one miracle, the perpetual fact of Being and Becoming, the ceaseless saliency, the transit from the vast to the particular, which miracle, one and the same has for its most universal name the word God.