Top Shelf: Five Favorite Paragraphs

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Top Shelf Five Favorite Paragraphs

• By Mr. Hill

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1 Ernest Hemingway
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2 Cormac McCarthy
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page 52

• A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half
  naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or
  wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins
  of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform
  still tracked with the blood of prior owners,
  coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided
  cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one
  with an ubrella and one in white stockings and a
  bloodstained weddingveil and and some in headgear
  of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the
  horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigentailed
  coat warn backwards and otherwise naked and one
  in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the
  breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old
  blows of mace or sabre done in another country by
  men whose very bones were dust and many with
  their braides spliced up with the hair of other
  beasts until they trailed upon the ground and
  their horses ear and tails worked with bits of
  brightly colored cloth and one whose horses
  whole head was painted crimson red and all the
  horsemens faces gaudy and grotesque like a
  company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all
  howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down
  upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible
  yet that the brimstone land of christian
  reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed
  in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions
  beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and
  the lip jerks and drools.

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3 Roberto Bolano.I cant even say.
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page 14

• Heres what happened I got to the Encrucijada
  at eight. The bar was packed, the crowd grim and
  grisly beyond belief. In a corner there was
  actually a blind man playing the accordion and
  singing. All the same, I elbowed my way into the
  first opening I spotted at the bar. Rosario
  wasnt there. When I asked the birl behind the
  bar where Rosario was, she acted as if the
  question were somehow fickle, flighty, presuming.
  But she was smiling, as if didnt think that was
  so bad. Honestly, I didnt know what she was
  trying to get at. Then I asked her where Rosario
  was from, and she told me that she was from
  Veracruz. I asked her where she was from too.
  From here, from Mexico City, she said. What
  about you? Im a cowboy from Sonora, I said.
  Im not sure why, it just popped out. In real
  life, Ive never been to Sonora.

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4 Haruki Murakami
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page 67

• What are you doing here? she asked.
• Looking for a cat, I said.
• Are you sure? It doesnt look that way to me.
  Youre just sitting there and whistling with your
  eyes closed. Itd be kinda hard to find much of
  anything that way, dont you think?
• I felt myself blushing.
• It doesnt bother me, she went on, but
  somebody who doesnt know you might think you
  were some kind of a pervert. She paused.
  Youre not a pervert, are you?
• Probably not, I said.
• And your whistlings terrible, she said.
  Youre not gay, are you?
  
• Probably not, I said. Why?
• Somebody told me they are lousy whistlers. Is
  that true?
  
• Who knows. Its probably nonsense.

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5 Ranier Maria Rilke
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page 23

• Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and
  with nothing so little to be reached as with
  criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be
  just toward them.
• Leave to your opinions their own quiet
  undisturbed development, which, like all
  progress, must come from deep within and cannot
  be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is
  gestation and then bringing forth. To let each
  impression and each germ of a feeling come to
  completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the
  inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach
  of ones own intelligence, and await with deep
  humility the birth hour of a new clarity that
  alone is living the artists life in
  understanding as in creating.