Your best line of original prose

[Naykidape]

Point of this thread is to share the one line (or two, or three, or four) from any of your work that you're the most proud of.

It can be anything from anywhere as long as it's yours.

Here's mine, meant to describe the women in a typical working class neighborhood in Chicago:

"Wanna-be bohemian housewives chain-smoking and day dreaming in the sweat-stained soap opera silence."

Update from the current moderator: As per this sticky,

Note that regardless of what the thread's originator suggested or what other people have posted in the past, your whatever line, singular, is acceptable. Longer excerpts will be deleted. There are plenty of display sites else-web if you're looking to show off your work.

 

[Unimportant]

Point of this thread is to share the one line (or two, or three, or four) from any of your work that you're the most proud of.

It can be anything from anywhere as long as it's yours.

Here's mine, meant to describe the women in a typical working class neighborhood in Chicago:

"Wanna-be bohemian housewives chain-smoking and day dreaming in the sweat-stained soap opera silence."

Naykidape, please don't start duplicate threads. I will ask the mod for this room to merge this thread with your previous one.

 

[Naykidape]

Sorry @Unimportant , I don't know how that happened.

 

[Unimportant]

Sorry @Unimportant , I don't know how that happened.

Sometimes if you hit "post reply" and the forum glitches and it looks like it's locked, and then you hit "post reply" again, it posts it twice. I once hit "post reply" about ten times before realising this. It's like a print queue! When it finally comes back online and pukes up all the replicate posts, ya feel like a dummy

 

[jhe1valu]

I can feel like a dummy without all that bother - just name the day!!!

Whimsy is my friend, Joe

 

[Maryn]

The man is the color of old oak and stands just as strong and straight, his black hair military short, salt and pepper at the temples. The corners of limpid brown eyes crease; behind his mask, he’s smiling.

 

[jhe1valu]

Another thing Val was very good with was women. That he had already had most of the available women in Memphis had been bandied about and snickered over by busybodies and bluenoses throughout the town.

His friendly, easygoing manner, coupled with his dashing good looks and brilliant smile and enhanced by his trim, muscular physique, only served to make him an absolute magnet for the fairer sex.

But things had changed for Val Dimand lately. Though there was really no way he could have been as prodigious at coupling with women as was often described - without parts falling off the man - for the past few years, Val had been completely a one-woman man.

 

[Sully317]

I don't really have a best/favorite, but here's one of mine I do like:

Markel was the kid in school with one too many syllables who stepped from shadow to shadow and missed the light.

 

[jhe1valu]

A pile of bones from his decomposed skeleton, nestled at the base of one of those massive timbers, lay beneath a skull fastened to the wood by a railroad spike through each eye socket, still lashed with the rawhide from that dreadful night. Above it, a hand lettered sign spiked to the wood proclaimed:

 

[jhe1valu]

The fifth member of the party was another longtime friend of Davy’s, George Russel. He was an interesting character in his own right, to say the least. A completely competent frontiersman, especially as a ghostlike woodsman, Russel was the most educated. He also had the gift of being able to teach what he had learned, so many nights around a Crockett campfire were spent in discourse about politics on a national scale, civics, history, and even mathematics!


Over the course of years, Russel’s friendship with Crockett would help take Davy into the history books. But on this trip, he was needed to help make certain this was a sound business venture. Everyone enjoyed, and was enriched by, what George Russel brought to the group.

 

[Fi Webster]

The texts she read all agree that it's not so simple as starting with a glob of lead: the prima materia of alchemy must be discovered, with the help of whatever ancient volumes and divine powers the alchemist may choose to call on. Their clues to whether they've found the right substance are as follows: it's everywhere; it's the macrocosm; it's the microcosm; it's undifferentiated; it's a solid dark mass of chaos; it's a black, somewhat viscous, semi-solid gooey thing. There's a 17th century etching showing the prima materia as swirling masses of a substance somewhat like clouds, sort of like wind, sort of like animals, sort of like humans, all dark and confused. The prima materia is not only the shadowy glob in the alchemist's crucible, but also the dark confusion and chaos in the psyche of the person starting out on the journey of the Great Work.

[My fantasy is that my book will have illustrations. Unlikely, I know.]

 

[jhe1valu]

Angie was also grateful for the relative safety the town afforded them. She no longer had to scan the horizon for Kiowa raiding parties or grass fires, and if one of the family was sick or injured, a real doctor could be summoned. Sleeping peacefully through the night was now an expectation, rather than a hope.

 

[jhe1valu]

Margie knew how much of a man she had gotten in Dix and was always happy to show him that she knew it. At 43, he was still well-muscled and trim, with character lines on his face beginning to give him a more-worldly and an even more handsome look. Margie loved to just look at Dix, even while he was sleeping.

 

[jhe1valu]

He had seen the new LaSalle down at the station and felt it was his duty to help welcome such a well-heeled stranger to Ripley.

 

[Stormshine]

It barely seemed to register as an event at all. Like she was a piece of luggage that had rolled away. And now that the luggage had been properly secured, what was there to be concerned about?

 

[akhooper]

Father and daughter stood tense and unsure, two players in a game with long forgotten rules.

 

[jhe1valu]

The truck with them in it pulled back up into the front yard, just a few moments after Palmer and Phil Graves had seated themselves at the dining table.

Grandma Essie, getting on in years but still amiable, had been chatting with her “two handsome young men” when the others came in from the truck.

 

[jhe1valu]

His face turned to stark terror when Grandma Essie came through the front door with the old Springfield Civil War musket in her hands and the Walker Colt around her waist in that old holster. The look on her face alone would have killed his whole family – and she couldn’t miss from where she stood.

 

[jhe1valu]

Joe’s smile faded a bit but did not vanish. It wasn’t the outcome that he would have wanted from this first encounter in more than five years, but he now knew with certainty that she was still in Memphis, and that she had recognized him.

Lightning had indeed struck twice; not perfect, but Joe could wait.

 

[dickson]

“Bloody tree stands to this day, watched at all hours for signs of unusual behavior.”

 

[cy_klops_]

I don't really keep track of pithy lines but here is something from today:

"Sports were sacred on the North Shore. The hallowed rites of hazing, the forging of new brotherhoods and sisterhoods, the reticent coaches who stepped in for absent fathers: these were load-bearing columns of the social order. Through sports, anything was possible. Earn the respect of parents who otherwise didn’t care for you. Find admittance in elite universities that, if not for your athletics, would forget to even send you a rejection. For the otherwise unexceptional or the hopelessly adrift, sports answered all of life's important and distressing questions."

 

[jhe1valu]

Dix Cunningham’s shooting prowess, already highly respected, now became the stuff of legend, particularly the part about firing his final two shots into the shotgun-toting “crazy guy” before he could get off a shot into the group of innocent bystanders, and all by lifting and firing his revolver - calmly and deadly-accurately - all with a badly-wounded arm.

 

[billbird2111]

"You are dealing with a unique creature. This creature is called the federal government. Your training has been with the New Mexico State Legislature, Guadalupe County, and the City of Santa Rosa. Washington D.C. is a different animal. I learned this from experience. People refer to it as a ‘swamp’ for a reason. Be careful, Dan. Swamps have snakes. Some of them bite.”

 

[jhe1valu]

He tilted his head back, in deep thought.

“My great grandmother Ruthie went with Oskar and the family to Arkansas, even though she had been born in Memphis. “Whither thou goest…” and all that. They had their little boy, Bob, with them. But the last thing they had to do before leaving town was to bury their little Rose Ellen, who died from the yellow fever. She was three, I think.”

 

[fancypants3000]

"It was next to impossible and endlessly painful being the only child of vampires." From my work Oddfrid Barfred