Just curious about anyone else's favorite parts of TRST, whether a favorite line or lines, favorite bit or scene, or favorite part or element of the story. I'm guessing that, like most, the answer is likely the same as mine, which is "too many too list without re-typing pretty much the whole book" which might then beg the question of why the heck am I even asking an apparently unanswerable question -- which now has me thinking about that.....

Well, I'm asking it anyway.

Some top faves for me -- the hyphenated "word concept" as in "I trip-stumbled my way over the debris..." And that's not a quote, but you get the idea. :)

I thought that it was a great literary license-taking (among many equally wonderful TRST literary innovations) that brought more to the words than could have been said in any other way. Kind of like Asian language I suppose, in that multiple ideas are joined to express a thought that is a made powerful by the sum of its parts.

A couple of fave quotes I took note of in my almost-done second reading: (I seem to be hyphenating now...)

"I think there's a small block of original quiet that exists in the world. 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. -- a last natural wilderness, time's shrinking little Antarctica."

I love that small block of original quiet. I live in it often.

And, along those lines:

"It was dark, still very early. The city a quiet insomnia of smog, purple skies, puddles, rubbish and white and yellow sodium. It was a time and place of cats, occasional trucks, occasional taxis and occasional spots of rain."

Yeah, I stay up late a lot...or early....

Many more of course, but would love to know what stood out particularly with other readers.

Cheers all.

M

That was one of my favorite quotes too.

I noticed a bit from the end section of the book that I never had before, and thought it conveyed a pretty complicated concept really well.

"The sun was so hot it gave everything - the sea, my skin, the warm pale decking under my feet - its own sort of holiday smell. That heat smell you forget ever existed in the cold and the rain and the dark grey evenings, but a smell that comes back to you like a dream, like waking up, when the sun is high in the sky."

It's something I find myself almost actively waiting for, as nine inches of snow drag winter on way past its welcome here in New Jersey.

I also find that now, after reading Raw Shark, the word fragment really catches my attention now. I don't know why or what or how, but anything concerning fragments just seems that much more important to me. And the simpe simple word seems to hold so much in it: Where it came from, what it was a part of, why it is lost or at least why it has become the fragment that it is. Its not necessarily a part of the book, but after reading TRST, fragments are just more than junk to me now!
"you see, the world is in fragments sir"
;)

One part that always makes me think is ..

"It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go: that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic: that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

Brilliant, makes you think, (reminds me of stuff I used to write)

---

See in black and white, feel in slow motion....

"We had sex, and when we finished, Clio folded her elbows and lay on top of me, me still inside her, her head on my shoulders, her forehead touching my chin. It all felt so clear, so in-focus and specific. My fingertips on her wet back, over her ribs. Her body rising and falling from my breathing, the slight stretch in her skin from hers. Our breath moving in and out of synch. The resistance against the fill of my lunchs: Clio's weight in the world. Just all this. I stroked the hair from her temple, followed the arch of her ear as gently as I could, over the ghost hairs that lived there, almost not touching at all. This was everything, at the heart of everything this was a simple, perfect just-is."

I don't know why THAT passage spoke so deeply to me, but it did.
And countless others, of course, but that one is the one I have made all of my friends read to prove to them the genius of Steven Hall's writing.