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[twilightgardens]

In a book of such rich and interesting language, there are many beautiful passages and lines. What line from the book is your favourite? Why? After my third reading I went back and made a list of all my favourites, and I can narrow it down to two, both from Alex

Comments

[whitnail]

well, of course

"I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."

[piratedoll]

I was just about to post that one.^

When I read it I couldn't stop thinking it, over and over and over again. It's a brilliant quote.

[vingus]

I wish I hadn't loaned my copy out or else I'd harvest but those two are in the top ranks. Maybe the second was what made me first think more of their relationship.

That's why I don't lend my copy out anymore.

[twilightgardens]

The second line made me really consider their relationship, too. With that in mind, the lines that really cemented it for me occured in Alex's last letter:

There is such a thing as love that cannot be, for certain. If I were to inform Father, for example, about how I comprehend love, and who I desire to love, he would kill me, and this is no idiom.

and the way he ended it:

For the first time in my life, I told my father exactly what I thought, as I will now tell you, for the first time, exactly whaht I think. As with him, I ask for your forgiveness.

Love,
Alex

That just killed me.

Re: That's why I don't lend my copy out anymore.

[vingus]

Ahhh, exactly. I read that over and over just to be sure I got it right.

I will have to buy another tomorrow.

Did you see the movie?

favorite lines

[sarahw18]

page 135 (paperback edition): "They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them. Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious- not like all of the words that come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim."

andddd...

page 197: "Upon hearing that it was a Jew who invented the love poem, the unrequited magistrate Rufkin S, may his name be lost between the cushions, rained all fire and broken glass upon our simple shtetl. (It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.)"

[ianthinex]

I've just gone through the book at done the same. Two of mine have to be:

"..if God does exist, He would have a great deal to be sad about. And if He doesn't exist, then that too would make him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad."

"They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I'm being totally honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists."

[le_brouillard]

One of my very favorite quotes that comes to mind:

"...if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. "

[twilightgardens]

Wow...where in the book is that quote? I assume it's in one of the Trachimbrod sections, but I don't remember it.

[le_brouillard]

It's in Falling in Love, 1791 - 1803. Page 82. One of the Yankel and Brod chapters.