Favorite Literary Passages

We've done favorite quotes and favorite poems. Does anyone else have a favorite literary passage? I have several I was going to include one in my diary but I realized I already used it twice already so I'm starting this thread instead.

� �when I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me�that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter�except to show how very dull we are,� he ended, �

That's from The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell.

The whole thing from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where we learn the population of the universe is zero.

And, many many of the Guide's parts. :)

And I used a passage in my diary years ago from Neil Gaiman's American Gods but I can't quite remember what it was. But it was awesome.

mr. collins's proposal and lizzie's refusal in pride & prejudice will always be one of my favorites.

hahah...I just watched the whole A&E version of that last night. I was dying for some Colin Firth.

Yay Jane Austen!

When I took the Millionaire test one question was "What authoress created the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse?" See you helped me pass the test.

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it
is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live
forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one
gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands
alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and
watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and
marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes
one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange
unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun-- which has been
happening every morning for thousands and thousands and
thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.
And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a
wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting
through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again
and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one
tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at
night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one
sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true;
and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.