Literature as a substitute to dynamite.

I was reading a recent article in Kalki, a Tamil magazine, about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the experiences that led to his first book- the classic, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The opening line of that novel still haunts me.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

There are some sentences in literature that are like epiphanies- they transcend the moment, and dimly part the veil to reveal, albeit only fleetingly, the truly wonderful.

And, so here's a list from my limited experience, of sentences that exploded into my world.

Satyajit Ray's Fritz, in one chilling twist, confirms all our worst fears: "There lay at our feet, covered in dust, lying flat on its back, a twelve-inch-long, pure white, perfect little skeleton."

In Joseph Heller's war satire Catch-22, probably the funniest, insanely-infuriating lines (and in a way probably the saddest) in the book:
"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immedeate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

And the mind warping Douglas Adams' sensational paragraph in a foreword to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"...And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever."

I couldn't help but include this bizarre gem of sophistry from the same classic:
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."

And to wind off this post, Louis de Berniere (remember Captain Corelli's Mandolin?- it's by the same guy). His style lies somewhere between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Douglas Adams. I was lucky enough to get my hands to his South American trilogy- The War of Don Emmanuel's nether parts; Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord; and The Troubled Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. Some of the funniest, surreal and cruellest books I've read. Take a look at the opening line of Senor Vivo and judge for yourself.
"Ever since his young wife had give birth to a cat as an unexpected consequence of his experiments in sexual alchemy, and ever since his accidental invention of a novel explosive that confounded Newtonian physics by losing its force at the precise distance of two metres from the source of its blast, President Veracruz had thought of himself not only as an adept but also as an intellectual."