Greatest Paragraph in English Literature? Pic Related

>>8308947
>Anything good or even redeemable
>SHV
No

>>8308947
that's pretty good. What book anon?

>>8308947
Only part of the book I found to be likeable tbhfam.
That and the part with the horses being driven by the men beyond exhaustion with bleeding mouths and cracked hooves.

The rest is smug mumbling.

also no, that's not the best paragraph

>>8308953
it literally says right there "Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegurt"

To be, or not to be, that is the question - whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep - no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to - 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life, for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th'unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.

>>8308947

>I am not a native English speaker and I not that much of a Joyce fan, but this paragraph certaily is a masterpiece (although it is based in a great passage in Homer’s Iliad):

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 faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

>>8309014
>based on the Illiad

How so? I've never seen it compared to it. Care to elaborate?

File: sophia3.jpg (20KB, 224x255px) Image search: [Google]

20KB, 224x255px

From Walden by Thoreau.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”7

>>8309085

Richard Ellmann made the association in his biography of Joyce.

I read the Iliad in Portuguese, but I searched an English translation for the specific passage; maybe you should look for the best English translation, but here I will quote Pope:

Their ardour kindles all the Grecian powers;
And now the stones descend in heavier showers.
As when high Jove his sharp artillery forms,
And opes his cloudy magazine of storms;
In winter's bleak un comfortable reign,
A snowy inundation hides the plain;
He stills the winds, and bids the skies to sleep;
Then pours the silent tempest thick and deep;
And first the mountain-tops are cover'd o'er,
Then the green fields, and then the sandy shore;
Bent with the weight, the nodding woods are seen,
And one bright waste hides all the works of men:
The circling seas, alone absorbing all,
Drink the dissolving fleeces as they fall:
So from each side increased the stony rain,
And the white ruin rises o'er the plain.

Is on Book XII

>>8309085

One "l"

>>8309116
Line numbers?

>>8309148

I searched on Project Gutenberg: the lines are not numbered. Sorry, I would have quoted if they were.

>>8308947
What typeface is this?