Show, don't tell.

[jadis]

The new journal layout that I've picked for the community allows a sticky post that stays at the top of the community page. With this new feature available, I'd like to try a few more discussion-driven activities that were hard to sustain in the old format. In the past, posts rolled off the front page before they had a chance to get going and I'd

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My favorite book all of time

[greencudagal]

I am glad you are no relation of mine. I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to visit you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty . . . You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back . . . into the red-room . . . And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me-knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale. ’Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. . . .
~Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Salman Rushdie

[zerodette]

From The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The narrator (a photographer) is speaking of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who took the first photograph:

…it was you, great Anarch!, who stole the gods' gift of permanent vision, of the transformation of sight into memory, of the actual into the eternal - that is, the gift of immortality - and bestowed it upon mankind. Where are you now, O Titanic seer, Prometheus of film? If the gods have punished you, if you're chained to a pillar high up on an Alp while a vulture munches your guts, take comfort in the news. This just in: the gods are dead, but photography is alive & kicking. Olympus? Pah! It's just a camera now.

From Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

[mamaslilqueer]

By Tom Robbins

Accepting a wet bottle from Switters, he examined it at some length. "Nostalgia's nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history, but I'd be lying like a cop in court if I was to tell you Sing Ha was anything but a sucky beer."

Switters nodded. "It went down well enough in Bangkok, where there was hardly any choice, but here in the land of a thousand brewskies, it does come across as rather weak-kneed and effete."

"Tastes like butterfly piss. Of course, it's brewed by Buddhists. Guess it takes a Christian to put some muscle in a liquid refreshment."

"That's it. It's the fear and anger that's missing in Sing Ha. Bereft of those punitive and vindictive qualities we Christers have come to respect and love. No bops in the hops. No assault in the malt.."

Every word he writes is perfectly intentional.

[killer_kitty]

From "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenger

Clare is silent. Her pragmatism and her romantic feelings about Jesus and Mary are, at thirteen, almost equally balanced. A year ago, she would have said God without hesitation. In ten years she will vote for determinism, and ten years after that Clare will believe that the universe is arbitrary, that if God exists he does not hear our prayers, that cause and effect are inescapable and brutal, but meaningless.

And after that? I don't know. But right now Clare sits on the threshold of adolescence with her faith in one hand and her growing skepticism in the other, and all she can do is try to juggle them, or squeeze them together until they fuse.

[clairyh]

I was going to post something from Time Travellers Wife; I fell in love with that book!

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

[patdislove]

I find it hard to talk about myself. I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I? paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as me. But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors--values, standards, my own limitations as an observer--make me, the narrator, select and eliminate things about me, the narratee. I've always been disturbed by the thought that I'm not painting a very objective picture of myself