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From Portrait of an Artist as a Young man by James Joyce. Here is the last sentence of this great novel:
"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
Now, the wonder of this sentence, is that it concludes a novel that began with this opening line:
"Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, I saw a moo-cow coming down the road."
"We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day."
Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Non-Fiction, by Jon Franklin. Also, An Open Book, by Michael Dirda. Dirda is a book reviewer for the Washington Post and writes beautifully himself. I return to both for inspiration at least once a year.
Best opening paragraph ever...From Raymond Chandler's short story Red Wind: "There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."
No list could be complete without my favorite lines from Shakespeare.
I have three daughters, and we named each after a favorite female character from The Bard. OK, I'm a Shakespeare fanatic, what can I say?
When Kate, Olivia and Juliet were born, I scoured the plays for the perfect quotes for their baptismal announcement.
Here's what I came up with:
"Oh, she doth make the torches burn bright."
(for my youngest daughter, Juliet).
"Good morrow, Kate, for that's your name I hear. For you are called plain Kate, and bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the Cursed. But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom."
(for my eldest daughter, Kate.)
"Halloa your name to the reverbate hills and let the bellowing gossips of the air cry out, 'Olivia'."
(for my middle daugher, Olivia)
As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all - the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them. ~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 1997, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore
Somewhat off topic, but Mark's post on the Shakespeare inspiration compelled me to relate that had we had a daughter, the name Kathleen was our first choice simply because of the song from an Irish tenor, "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen." Thus, we had two boys and gave them family names. Don't tell them, but many a sleepless night, I walked the baby boys to sleep using the Irish ballad as a lullaby.
As for books, "Stephen King on Writing" was a very interesting source of inspiration.
As a history buff and an eternal optimist, even in the face of so many reasons to be a pessimist, I often find inspiration in the words of Lincoln or Jefferson.
Anything by Joseph Conrad always seems to emphasize for me the capabilties of our language.
"The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth."
"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish."
It is the first line of Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, and is remarkable as a model of brevity -- it covers the three basic elements of a story in one sentence: setting, protagonist, and complication.
