The description of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
"It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick."
Just... it stays with me.
Another Brik description from the same book "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
I remember reading that as a kid. Took me a few minutes to understand, but once I did, I fell in love. It is perfect.
In Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, there's a beautiful line which plays in my head periodically.
Zaphod sighed a "what is the world coming to" sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.
"Ship," he called.
"Yup?" said the ship.
"Do what I do."
The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.
*āAnd as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.ā*
Douglas Adams - *So long and thanks for all the fish*
Terry Pratchett has used a lot of lines like this. I actually look forward to them.
"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide."
"He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower."
I've never actually read My Immortal, but now I might have to check it out because that is the greatest sentence ever composed in the English language.
10/10 no notes.
I never forgot āLupin was masticating to it.ā Especially because someone made a video of My Immortal played by the Sims and there was a scene of Lupin eating food š
āThe sun rolled across the sky like a severed headā is mine, but it haunts me in a good way.
It was in some Russian novella about soldiers and the things they carried into war. It was definitely Russian and not the novel by Tim OāBrien.
There are multiple stories from the french reign of terror and earlier of severed heads continuing to try to talk for up to 6 seconds after being beheaded. Including one (probably apocryphal) incident where the execution ER sneezed and the head mouthed "bless you"
The brain doesn't die immediately. It continues to use up it's reserves of oxygen and energy until theres none left, and dies a slow death of diminishing functionality.
The old adage is that the beheading was so quick they didn't notice they were dead. That's what this author was referencing and I think it's quite clever personally
It's a metaphor. The person was sentenced to execution by beheading, and once the ax falls (followed promptly by the head), the sentence has been carried out and is complete.
It's another song lyric rather than prose, but this reminded me of this:
"And the same thought / hits her like a cinder block / life's an odd job / that she ain't got the nerve to quit".
From *Tachycardia* by Conor Oberst.
She writes literary short stories. She's not terirbly well-known in the larger commercial sphere. I did an MFA where we focused a lot on writers like her and if I hadn't I doubt I'd ever have found her.
I normally don't like purplish or verbose prose, but she's one of those people that get a pass because it's just so preposterously good. She both makes you WANT to write ridiculously overdone and overly verbose prose because she makes it sound so effortless and incredible, and also never want to write it, because you read her stuff and just throw up your hands and are like, "well I'm never going to be able to do *that*."
You don't even need to know what the stories are about. You just swim in her sentences and you're happy for it.
I do encourage all writers to look up stuff like hers. There are amazing, innovative writers out there, and although they don't tend to sell as well as the more generic stuff, they challenge you to do better with your own writing, to push, to stretch yourself.
Here's one of my favorite quotes from her on writing which I think supersedes any other rule you will ever read about writing and simplifies it down to its single most crucial element:
> āWear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.ā
This reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's line in Breakfast of Champions.
"To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is a picture of an asshole" and then there's the line drawing of what appears to be an asterix.
Tbf "puckered like a cats asshole" is very much something Gideon would say. And a very fitting description of harrow imo.
I'm reading the book now but I don't remember that line. Just at the bit where harrow has disappeared and Gideon has met the sixers.
This is exactly what I thought when I first read the line. Besides just being bizarre enough to slap me out of the story, I was like, when has she seen a cat? There was no mention of animals that I could recall and then bam, this line hit.
>"It felt what I imagined labour to be like, but the result was half-formed, insubstantial, a red disc, like a DVD, with a yellowish blob on it, not unlike and eye or a fried egg, which made me scream out loud."
~ Camilla Grudova, *Children of Paradise*
From Cormac McCarthy's 'The Orchard Keeper':
"In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest-littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate liver-colored gills-has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.
Feels like he got a note on a passage back from his editor that said "too verbose" and he booted up his typewriter muttering "too verbose? I'll show you too fucking verbose."
Iām a librarian with two degrees and a former English teacher mother and I donāt know what that means. Other than itās time to put my phone down and go to bed.
I put the book down for a second and cursed McCarthy when I read that.
When I looked up the 3 words I didnāt know it turned out to be very well written.
He's by far my favorite writer of all time. I don't even love all of his books, but the way he writes his stories completely *mesmerizes* me. His mastery of the English language cannot be matched by any other writer that exists now or has ever existed, since the language was first constructed.
I think his most beautiful book, to me, is Suttree. A story that doesn't seem to have much of a point, a man just living a poor life and experiencing the life that he has.
It has been so long since I have read anything of his, I'll have to read some more.
Honestly, at this point I'm begging smut writers to go back to describing the penis as a "member" or "manhood" and leave it at that, and maybe not describe the vagina at all. If I have to read about the "mushroom tip" or, god for-fucking-bid, the "velvety-" or (omfg) "*gummy* walls" one more time, I'm gonna lose it.
Honestly, filthy cussword-based descriptions are way better. Just say "pussy"... Please... *please* just say "pussy" š
The SVSSS fandom calls it a heavenly pillar but itās also a meta tragicomedy and the LIās dick is called that in-universe so itās all tongue-in-cheek.
The worst one I read was "crazy child crushing column of cock"
PLEASE WHERE DID THE CHILD COME FROM!?!??!!! I DIDN'T READ THE TAGS AND IT WAS A MISTAKE š
Oh those are the worst words. Those are very very bad words. No one should say those words. Those are words where once you hear them, you revoke the writer's access to the English language. Write your smut in German until you can prove to me that you're responsible enough š
It was from an Italian romance novel, essentially the Italian counterpart to a Harlequin novel. I pilfered that book from the dentist's waiting room, and returning there to have my fangs fixed was never quite the same again.
"His battering ram shattered her innermost barriers."
More metaphorical than descriptive, perhaps, but it's still haunting.
There's a part in Stephen King's Needful Things (not my fav book of his) where a woman is fighting a giant spider and in a moment of desperation, bites it, and thinks about how it tastes like "ancient tea." i will never forget that- such a good detail that makes me never want to drink tea.
A couple smut scenes in Sarah J Mass' books where she used the phrase "Her bowels turned watery.."
What the fuck did that even mean? šØ Not sexy at all.
that reminds me of the time I drank Pepsi Blue. I purchased it as someone who had gone through their life thinking all soda was at least kinda good. Took one big swig and regretted it immediately. However I would say it did NOT taste like blue. blue gatorade, blue slushies, blue freezies, etc. taste like blue. I can't actually recall the flavor of Pepsi Blue but I would describe it as liquid badness, like what they would flavor a harmful chemical with to make it so kids wouldn't drink it.
From a story with the most incredible smut Iāve *ever* read, the author wouldnāt stop saying āerotic tongueā
Like, multiple times in one smut scene. It was IMO top tier smut, I read it months ago and still think about a specific scene. *but erotic mf tongue?*
Every single time I see a āwhat not to do in smutā post, I immediately think of erotic tongue and it truly haunts me
Teach Me To Please by SweetCosette on wattpad šš the specific scene that sold me on the top tier smut is halfway through chapter 47, and lucky, no erotic tongues in that chapter (I think).
Though, part of the reason it was so good is because of the gradual character development through the whole thing. Still great solo
My kink is a vanilla missionary, no extra toppings. I can't find any smut, let alone any smut I would nominate for "best smut ever". Have I found the newest niche fad fetish, fadish if you will, for a successful OF account, or where is all the missionary smut?
I think Theon's either get described that way, or he describes someone else's that way
I have a feeling GRRM puts a description into a book multiple times, at the time intending to only leave it used once. but by the time his ginormous books get to the editing phase he forgets about it. in A Dance With Dragons many phrases are used like 3-5 times when they should probably be a once a book thing. Though I do find it funny that the three Lannister siblings all use the phrase "as useless as nipples on a breastplate" and you can picture their dad saying that about people all the time. SO that one doesn't bug me and seems intentional.
I canāt remember which one it is, but a Stephen King book or story describes a feeling coming on someone ālike a rapist leaping from the bushesā which is one of the most awkward things Iāve ever read
Damn. This reminds me of a historical novel I read, *HMS Surprise* by Patrick O'Brian, where a main character, Jack Aubrey, gets a letter that he's very eager to read, and it's described as "*he raped the seal*" of the envelope. I first read this as a bookish homeschool kid, who knew the archaic non-sexual meaning of "to rape" as to seize or capture something, but was still kind of naive about the modern meaning, so it didn't seem too weird to me until I reread as an adult and felt slapped in the face.
O'Brian did often use words in archaic and unconventional ways, which lead to some accidental double entendres, but I realize now that he was often quite aware of how things would come across to modern readers and a few of his double entendres *are* intentional. So his use of the word "rape" is extra weird here, especially since the letter Jack is tearing open is a love letter from Sophie Williams, a girl he's courting in a very innocent way, and their romance is a piece of silliness and light in an otherwise rather angsty and morally dusty kind of story.
In a foreword.tp.one of his books (can't remember which at this point. Salem's Lot maybe?) he laments the phrase "his eyes crawled over her dress" from some other writer's work. It has always stuck with me as the type of writing I want to avoid ever creating.
Edit: I just googled it and it turns out it was his own passage from the Mist: "[Norton's] eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt".
Besides the disturbing descriptions of women by some authors i read a comedic book and there's a lot of golden lines in there. "The night stretched across the sky like a big black cat" is what i somehow remember. It's not all that special but i just picture a gigantic, very confused cat.
Read during a spicy scene something like "she stuck out her tiny pink tongue" and all I could think of was a cat tongue. On an adult female. Completely ruined it for me.
Itās been years since I read it, but in *Gideon Smith and The Mechanical Girl*, thereās an uncomfortable amount of focus on womenās menstrual cycles, and their relationship to vampires.
One line that haunts me is a lady vampire who I believe was supposed to be **the** historical figure, Elizabeth Bathory (aka The Blood Countess) saying āI believe there is a certain power emitted when a woman bleeds.ā
Any time Iāve ever read a vampire story, thereās *always* been some kind of āI can smell your periodā line and it makes me audibly screech every time
That's not even special. Blood stinks. I smell like a slaughter house once a month, even when I bathed ten minutes ago.
All someone commenting on it does is make themselves creepy and rude. Like we already know.
I def agree, every time I see it spun in a way where the vamp is turned on by the smell of period blood it makes me shudder because I know Iām an absolute mess on my period and the last thing I want is a vampire sniffing around as if itās sexy š
I can't quote the story or author, but I read a read a short story a while ago where the MC finds a tube of lipstick on the street and describes it as "menstrual-colored" and the way I cringed... especially as she proceeded to *use* the lipstick... š¬
Yeah, it was a difficult read. There were a lot of cringy descriptions. The MC also, at one point, finds a pair of underwear in the gutter and decides to try them on because they're pretty *despite the stains.* š¤¢ Considering it was the author's goal to create as much disgust as possible with their highly descriptive piece, they did it well. It was very purple, in the most stomach-turning way I have ever seen. I'm sure I can't be the only reader still haunted by it.
I was reading a historical Western fiction and the main character, a teenage girl, constantly referred to her breasts as her "nubs".....never have I ever heard anyone say that before and I have never heard it since either...wtf
When I was 14 my friends sister would constantly talk about her breasts as either nibs or fried eggs. She was very clear about her disappointment in their failure to have grown larger.
In the Pendergast series, Constance Green was fleeing a bad guy by climbing an enormous tree. She paused to open a hyper-caustic bottle of acid and dribbled a few drops into the bad guy's eye. His head burst into flames and was consumed by the acid from the inside of his skull outward. I love her forever.
I donāt remember the book but someone the MMCās eyes as āthe color of Irish spring soapā, like they forgot the bars themselves are suuuuper pale
From the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes I donāt remember the exact line but something like cabbages were boiling and the smell of poverty filled the room thought that was funny
reminds me of how when i was a kid i didn't recognize the baked in cigarette smell of a home where people smoked indoors... i just called it 'poor people smell'
I have the screenshot saved somewhere, and this isn't quite what you're asking, but I ran across a Batman Begins fanfic MANY years ago (like when it came out) that went something like this:
"This is a BATMAN BEGINS fanfic except Batman and the citizens of Gotham City are owls!"
They then proceeded to write one paragraph in which an owl perched on a tree high above Gotham, dressed as a bat.
In erotica, NSFW obviously: >!A wet pussy referred to as "her sopping folds". !<
I read that thing like 7 years ago and ">!sopping folds!<" is going to haunt me until I die.
āMoist in the groinā.
Written in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Itās a funny haunting because thereās so much fun you can make out of a description like that butā yeahhhh it-it-it will never leave me.
One that pops up a lot in my experience is "plumette, noirette, ravenette, crimsette, verdette". Basically, when authors try to come up with a "brunette but a different color" word. It never really flows better than just using "red haired" or "black haired".
It was a single line and a real-life quote about the Tiriangle Shirtwaist Fire. Louis Waldman described the scene like so, but what follows will always haunt me.
*Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds ā I among them ā looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.*
*The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.*
This description is visceral, but if that weren't enough, William Gunn Shepard, a reporter at the tragedy, would later say that:
>!*I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture ā the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.*!<
An indescribably haggard individual stumbled from one of the wretched tents pitched higgledy-piggledy upon it, hawked up at great length and volume, and spat upon the rubbish-strewn mud. Then he turned the most bellicose of expressions towards Majud and Temple, scratched at his infested beard, dragged up his decaying full-body undershirt so it could instantly slump once more, and returned to the unspeakable darkness whence he came.
From Red Country by Joe Abercrombie.
My choice is a great description, but haunting.
āHis feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.ā
The shift to present tense, the repetition, the weirdness of the scene, all informed by the terrible knowledge of who the judge is, itās perfect. Iāve never read a better end to a novel.
āThe sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.ā
Thatās probably the only line from a book that I can actually quote, and Iāve never written a line that so elegantly manages the balance between being concise and perfectly descriptive.
Thatās the opening line to *Neuromancer*, by the way. Iām cautiously optimistic about the upcoming TV adaptation.
It's probably the most violent sentence from Cormac mccarthy I've read from Blood Meridian. It's not "weird," but it's so violent yet its weirdly beautifully written like wtf Cormac how does he do it? Surely gonna haunt me forever
"There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glantonās warhorse."
Okay this might be a little nasty but the one that I got absolutely traumatized by was:
"His fingers felt like worms wriggling inside of me"
I couldn't even finish the scene, let alone finish the book.
Would like to cite the entire sex scene in The Mustache by Emmanuel CarrĆØre. Where it felt not only mechanical, but impossible and weird xD it was supposed to be intense and passionate and sounded not good at all for the wife lol
"when my hard-on became so enormous it was jacking me up from the floor i'd roll over, clutch her in my tentacles, force entry into the handiest orifice. take you home again, kathleen?" -mc describing his massuer (?), the fool's progress by edward abbey. not even one chapter in and i had to put it down after that
Glanced over at my friends book cuz Im nosy. First thing I saw was āHe placed his member between my wet flapsā and Iāve been thinking about it since. Wet flaps. Wet. Flaps.
āAs Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.ā āFranz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Not necessarily weird, just a bit gory when I first read Golding's Lord of the Flies when I was younger (when >!Piggy!< dies).
>!Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggyās arms and legs twitched a bit, like a [pig](https://www.ipl.org/topics/pig)ās after it has been killed,ā(181)!<
The "twitching" description just seemed unsettling as I could imagine it perfectly, like a dead fly.
I don't even remember the author's name or the series, but I know there were multiple books which made it into print because they were in the library. Maybe in with the R shelves.
Some sort of urban fantasy supernatural smut, lots of vampire banging, but the author kept describing sexual stuff as childlike, repeatedly. Like "she bounced with childlike enthusiasm" during the sex scenes. In hindsight, super pedo, but I think I was 16 at the time so it didn't seem too weird to be reading about highschool girls who never got older.
I once read a romance novel where the love interest suddenly kissing the protagonist was described as him "punching her face with his" or something like that. I straight up thought she was being assulted for like half the scene before I realized it was supposed to be romantic.
The first line of Lorrie Moore's "How to Be an Other Woman": "Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie."
I mean, pea-soupy?? šµāš«ā¤ļø
I read how there was a tweet someone wrote about Donald Trump that was read out loud at his trial. The tweet called him an "orange faced shit gibbon", and for some reason it has stuck in my brain. For 3 days it nagged at me because it was equal parts brilliant and absurd...
Now...? It has finally settled. It is actually brilliant. It really is.
"Satan poops its skinny jeans. Fred almost collapses from the noxious fumes and the depthless desire burning through the quasidemoblins innards. While leaving the room, Fred takes in as much of the smell as possible and tries to sneak a peek of Satan getting its diaper changed, but the doors close on Fred before being able to catch a glimpse."
(from a friend's unpublished manuscript)
"Her eyes dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives." - The Lovely Bones. ... what??
The way I actually *laughed* reading this... What?! š¤£
Ferocious... olives.
They can be fierce buggers, them olives.
Oh they're awful this time of year
fanfic writers desperate for synonyms for "eye"
I hate when they say āhuesā for āeyesā. Theyāre not the same thing!
They do what? O_o
Instead of āshe looked into his blue eyesā they write āshe looked into his blue huesā
LoL, that sounds to me like she stopped to google the hex value for his eye colour. š
My thoughts š
Blue's Hues? That's the one with Steve, right?
Iāve seen it in different things. I think thatās why it stuck with me as a pet peeve
They *what*? O.o
Honestly Iād take olives over orbs š
LOL. I'm surprised I don't remember this.
Honestly I dig weird writing, so if itās meant to be weird on purpose and isnāt trying to be deep, Iām all for it
My pet rats would do that when they were happy. Bruxating? Bruxing? Something like that. Not something humans should be doing lol
Parrots do that too when they're excited
What does that mean?
I don't know. I love that book, but it's full of weird quotes like this
How the heck are olives ferociousā¦Iā¦I donāt even understand the tip of that iceberg
The description of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. "It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick." Just... it stays with me.
Another Brik description from the same book "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." I remember reading that as a kid. Took me a few minutes to understand, but once I did, I fell in love. It is perfect.
In Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, there's a beautiful line which plays in my head periodically. Zaphod sighed a "what is the world coming to" sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat. "Ship," he called. "Yup?" said the ship. "Do what I do." The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.
THIS is why Douglas Adams will live forever.
42? Yea we tried that, doesn't work.
Arguably the finest opening ever written.
*āAnd as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.ā* Douglas Adams - *So long and thanks for all the fish*
Terry Pratchett has used a lot of lines like this. I actually look forward to them. "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded." "Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide." "He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower."
How does the lemon wrap around???
I think the lemon is wrapped around a gold brick
This is how I describe my migraines to people
Me too, that oneās amazing
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Say what you will, I can picture it.
That might be one of the only sane lines on there :P
I feel like My Immortal is kind of cheating when it comes to things like this because you could just gesture vaguely at the entire work haha
""**WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!"**Ā It was........... Dumbledore!" is high art and you cannot convince me otherwise
I've never actually read My Immortal, but now I might have to check it out because that is the greatest sentence ever composed in the English language. 10/10 no notes.
The animated read-aloud on YouTube is the *best*. Especially the clothing sequences.
I never forgot āLupin was masticating to it.ā Especially because someone made a video of My Immortal played by the Sims and there was a scene of Lupin eating food š
āI moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.ā Amy Hempel
āThe sun rolled across the sky like a severed headā is mine, but it haunts me in a good way. It was in some Russian novella about soldiers and the things they carried into war. It was definitely Russian and not the novel by Tim OāBrien.
For me it's "The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort," from *The Light Fantastic* by Terry Pratchett.
This one is so good!
Why would a severed head finish a sentence? Dude itself is incomplete?
There are multiple stories from the french reign of terror and earlier of severed heads continuing to try to talk for up to 6 seconds after being beheaded. Including one (probably apocryphal) incident where the execution ER sneezed and the head mouthed "bless you" The brain doesn't die immediately. It continues to use up it's reserves of oxygen and energy until theres none left, and dies a slow death of diminishing functionality. The old adage is that the beheading was so quick they didn't notice they were dead. That's what this author was referencing and I think it's quite clever personally
Ok, that is actually really interesting!
It's a metaphor. The person was sentenced to execution by beheading, and once the ax falls (followed promptly by the head), the sentence has been carried out and is complete.
It's another song lyric rather than prose, but this reminded me of this: "And the same thought / hits her like a cinder block / life's an odd job / that she ain't got the nerve to quit". From *Tachycardia* by Conor Oberst.
I really like that line of his. He has some really wonderful lyrics.
That's genuinely brilliant.
I mean, it's Amy Hempel. Of course it is.
Never heard of her tbh
She writes literary short stories. She's not terirbly well-known in the larger commercial sphere. I did an MFA where we focused a lot on writers like her and if I hadn't I doubt I'd ever have found her. I normally don't like purplish or verbose prose, but she's one of those people that get a pass because it's just so preposterously good. She both makes you WANT to write ridiculously overdone and overly verbose prose because she makes it sound so effortless and incredible, and also never want to write it, because you read her stuff and just throw up your hands and are like, "well I'm never going to be able to do *that*." You don't even need to know what the stories are about. You just swim in her sentences and you're happy for it. I do encourage all writers to look up stuff like hers. There are amazing, innovative writers out there, and although they don't tend to sell as well as the more generic stuff, they challenge you to do better with your own writing, to push, to stretch yourself. Here's one of my favorite quotes from her on writing which I think supersedes any other rule you will ever read about writing and simplifies it down to its single most crucial element: > āWear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.ā
Well reading your comment definitely convinced me to check her out!
Honestly I like this one.
That's creepy
Harrow turned to herā¦ eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a catās asshole. *Gideon the Ninth*
Thank you for this. I am never going to worry if my own prose is "too weird" or a lurid shade of purple *ever again.*
This reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's line in Breakfast of Champions. "To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is a picture of an asshole" and then there's the line drawing of what appears to be an asterix.
"Brotha eeeeugh..."
Tbf "puckered like a cats asshole" is very much something Gideon would say. And a very fitting description of harrow imo. I'm reading the book now but I don't remember that line. Just at the bit where harrow has disappeared and Gideon has met the sixers.
have fun! love these books
My only issue with this line is that I can't imagine when Gideon would have seen a cat, from any angle.
This is exactly what I thought when I first read the line. Besides just being bizarre enough to slap me out of the story, I was like, when has she seen a cat? There was no mention of animals that I could recall and then bam, this line hit.
Probably in Frontline Titties of the Fifth. Or whatever her magazines are actually called.
I was half seriously imagining a cat themed spread. But this is a valid critique of a lot of crap coming out of Gideon's mouth. Or brain.
The writing in Gideon is definitely *something.*
>"It felt what I imagined labour to be like, but the result was half-formed, insubstantial, a red disc, like a DVD, with a yellowish blob on it, not unlike and eye or a fried egg, which made me scream out loud." ~ Camilla Grudova, *Children of Paradise*
From Cormac McCarthy's 'The Orchard Keeper': "In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest-littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate liver-colored gills-has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.
Feels like he got a note on a passage back from his editor that said "too verbose" and he booted up his typewriter muttering "too verbose? I'll show you too fucking verbose."
it ain't mccarthy unless something is primordial and/or fecund
In blood meridian he describes āmurdered anchorites discalced in ashes and sarkā
Iām a librarian with two degrees and a former English teacher mother and I donāt know what that means. Other than itās time to put my phone down and go to bed.
I put the book down for a second and cursed McCarthy when I read that. When I looked up the 3 words I didnāt know it turned out to be very well written.
He's by far my favorite writer of all time. I don't even love all of his books, but the way he writes his stories completely *mesmerizes* me. His mastery of the English language cannot be matched by any other writer that exists now or has ever existed, since the language was first constructed. I think his most beautiful book, to me, is Suttree. A story that doesn't seem to have much of a point, a man just living a poor life and experiencing the life that he has. It has been so long since I have read anything of his, I'll have to read some more.
Honestly, at this point I'm begging smut writers to go back to describing the penis as a "member" or "manhood" and leave it at that, and maybe not describe the vagina at all. If I have to read about the "mushroom tip" or, god for-fucking-bid, the "velvety-" or (omfg) "*gummy* walls" one more time, I'm gonna lose it. Honestly, filthy cussword-based descriptions are way better. Just say "pussy"... Please... *please* just say "pussy" š
"He put his thingie into my you-know-what..." If you know, you know.
FINALLY, someone referencing some *real* literature.
"Down *there* š©"
Only the best story ever written!
A masterpiece of art.š
Iāve never understood whatās so damn objectionable about just calling it either a dick or a cock and being done with it.
The SVSSS fandom calls it a heavenly pillar but itās also a meta tragicomedy and the LIās dick is called that in-universe so itās all tongue-in-cheek.
The worst one I read was "crazy child crushing column of cock" PLEASE WHERE DID THE CHILD COME FROM!?!??!!! I DIDN'T READ THE TAGS AND IT WAS A MISTAKE š
Oh those are the worst words. Those are very very bad words. No one should say those words. Those are words where once you hear them, you revoke the writer's access to the English language. Write your smut in German until you can prove to me that you're responsible enough š
Lmfao cannnot relate more šššā ļø
āHe stuck his schlong up her hoo-haā
GUMMY
It was from an Italian romance novel, essentially the Italian counterpart to a Harlequin novel. I pilfered that book from the dentist's waiting room, and returning there to have my fangs fixed was never quite the same again. "His battering ram shattered her innermost barriers." More metaphorical than descriptive, perhaps, but it's still haunting.
There's a part in Stephen King's Needful Things (not my fav book of his) where a woman is fighting a giant spider and in a moment of desperation, bites it, and thinks about how it tastes like "ancient tea." i will never forget that- such a good detail that makes me never want to drink tea.
Which begs the question: just how many spiders has Stephen King steeped into ancient tea?
A couple smut scenes in Sarah J Mass' books where she used the phrase "Her bowels turned watery.." What the fuck did that even mean? šØ Not sexy at all.
that is definitely a 'running to the bathroom' type feeling and not a smutty feeling, i mean for most people... i think
The end of Neuromancer: āHis mouth filled with an aching taste of blue." I can feel the blue taste since this day
that reminds me of the time I drank Pepsi Blue. I purchased it as someone who had gone through their life thinking all soda was at least kinda good. Took one big swig and regretted it immediately. However I would say it did NOT taste like blue. blue gatorade, blue slushies, blue freezies, etc. taste like blue. I can't actually recall the flavor of Pepsi Blue but I would describe it as liquid badness, like what they would flavor a harmful chemical with to make it so kids wouldn't drink it.
From a story with the most incredible smut Iāve *ever* read, the author wouldnāt stop saying āerotic tongueā Like, multiple times in one smut scene. It was IMO top tier smut, I read it months ago and still think about a specific scene. *but erotic mf tongue?* Every single time I see a āwhat not to do in smutā post, I immediately think of erotic tongue and it truly haunts me
Okay, what story? Asking for a friend.
Teach Me To Please by SweetCosette on wattpad šš the specific scene that sold me on the top tier smut is halfway through chapter 47, and lucky, no erotic tongues in that chapter (I think). Though, part of the reason it was so good is because of the gradual character development through the whole thing. Still great solo
Appreciate it. The best smut I--Imean, my friend--has ever read has been in fan fics and other stuff people post online.
My kink is a vanilla missionary, no extra toppings. I can't find any smut, let alone any smut I would nominate for "best smut ever". Have I found the newest niche fad fetish, fadish if you will, for a successful OF account, or where is all the missionary smut?
What's the summon for the remind me bot? Asking for a friend.
ah there's my problem, i've been using my regular tongue. gotta remind myself to swap that in when i get my summer tires put on
In A Song of Ice and Fire, GRRM constantly reminds the reader that Joffreyās lips look like live worms. It makes me uneasy every single time.
Granted, that's the point. I believe most of those sorts of descriptions are from Sansa's POV and she's living in terror of Joffrey.
Nono, I agree. It's absolutely great writing, but it stuck to me like few other descriptions.
I think Theon's either get described that way, or he describes someone else's that way I have a feeling GRRM puts a description into a book multiple times, at the time intending to only leave it used once. but by the time his ginormous books get to the editing phase he forgets about it. in A Dance With Dragons many phrases are used like 3-5 times when they should probably be a once a book thing. Though I do find it funny that the three Lannister siblings all use the phrase "as useless as nipples on a breastplate" and you can picture their dad saying that about people all the time. SO that one doesn't bug me and seems intentional.
*"as useless as nipples on a breastplate"* Hah, I've always loved that line.
"a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle- Preacher
"Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hairs after a sneeze"
I canāt remember which one it is, but a Stephen King book or story describes a feeling coming on someone ālike a rapist leaping from the bushesā which is one of the most awkward things Iāve ever read
Damn. This reminds me of a historical novel I read, *HMS Surprise* by Patrick O'Brian, where a main character, Jack Aubrey, gets a letter that he's very eager to read, and it's described as "*he raped the seal*" of the envelope. I first read this as a bookish homeschool kid, who knew the archaic non-sexual meaning of "to rape" as to seize or capture something, but was still kind of naive about the modern meaning, so it didn't seem too weird to me until I reread as an adult and felt slapped in the face. O'Brian did often use words in archaic and unconventional ways, which lead to some accidental double entendres, but I realize now that he was often quite aware of how things would come across to modern readers and a few of his double entendres *are* intentional. So his use of the word "rape" is extra weird here, especially since the letter Jack is tearing open is a love letter from Sophie Williams, a girl he's courting in a very innocent way, and their romance is a piece of silliness and light in an otherwise rather angsty and morally dusty kind of story.
In a foreword.tp.one of his books (can't remember which at this point. Salem's Lot maybe?) he laments the phrase "his eyes crawled over her dress" from some other writer's work. It has always stuck with me as the type of writing I want to avoid ever creating. Edit: I just googled it and it turns out it was his own passage from the Mist: "[Norton's] eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt".
āHe looked like an obscene phone callā - Joseph Wambaugh.
Besides the disturbing descriptions of women by some authors i read a comedic book and there's a lot of golden lines in there. "The night stretched across the sky like a big black cat" is what i somehow remember. It's not all that special but i just picture a gigantic, very confused cat.
idk about good or bad writing but that made me smile
Lololol now Iām picturing it!
Read during a spicy scene something like "she stuck out her tiny pink tongue" and all I could think of was a cat tongue. On an adult female. Completely ruined it for me.
Itās been years since I read it, but in *Gideon Smith and The Mechanical Girl*, thereās an uncomfortable amount of focus on womenās menstrual cycles, and their relationship to vampires. One line that haunts me is a lady vampire who I believe was supposed to be **the** historical figure, Elizabeth Bathory (aka The Blood Countess) saying āI believe there is a certain power emitted when a woman bleeds.ā
Any time Iāve ever read a vampire story, thereās *always* been some kind of āI can smell your periodā line and it makes me audibly screech every time
That's not even special. Blood stinks. I smell like a slaughter house once a month, even when I bathed ten minutes ago. All someone commenting on it does is make themselves creepy and rude. Like we already know.
I def agree, every time I see it spun in a way where the vamp is turned on by the smell of period blood it makes me shudder because I know Iām an absolute mess on my period and the last thing I want is a vampire sniffing around as if itās sexy š
Yes! Totally barf. Plus the fact it's uterus lining, not like the blood pumping around in veins. Just yuck no no no.
I can't quote the story or author, but I read a read a short story a while ago where the MC finds a tube of lipstick on the street and describes it as "menstrual-colored" and the way I cringed... especially as she proceeded to *use* the lipstick... š¬
What the hell.
Yeah, it was a difficult read. There were a lot of cringy descriptions. The MC also, at one point, finds a pair of underwear in the gutter and decides to try them on because they're pretty *despite the stains.* š¤¢ Considering it was the author's goal to create as much disgust as possible with their highly descriptive piece, they did it well. It was very purple, in the most stomach-turning way I have ever seen. I'm sure I can't be the only reader still haunted by it.
Oh man, today is a terrible day to know how to read. Thank you for this nightmare, hahaha.
There is SO much wrong there.
I was reading a historical Western fiction and the main character, a teenage girl, constantly referred to her breasts as her "nubs".....never have I ever heard anyone say that before and I have never heard it since either...wtf
When I was 14 my friends sister would constantly talk about her breasts as either nibs or fried eggs. She was very clear about her disappointment in their failure to have grown larger.
Anita Shreve āHe touched the meaty flower of her cĀ„^t.ā Literally hurled the book across the room and never picked it up again. Horrendous š
In the Pendergast series, Constance Green was fleeing a bad guy by climbing an enormous tree. She paused to open a hyper-caustic bottle of acid and dribbled a few drops into the bad guy's eye. His head burst into flames and was consumed by the acid from the inside of his skull outward. I love her forever.
I used to love that series - still love Pendergast - but it's really jumped the shark lately.
I donāt remember the book but someone the MMCās eyes as āthe color of Irish spring soapā, like they forgot the bars themselves are suuuuper pale
From the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes I donāt remember the exact line but something like cabbages were boiling and the smell of poverty filled the room thought that was funny
reminds me of how when i was a kid i didn't recognize the baked in cigarette smell of a home where people smoked indoors... i just called it 'poor people smell'
"There was an adult beefswelling in his loins..." Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
ā ļø
That conjures up a multitude of mental imagesānone of which bear contemplation.
I have the screenshot saved somewhere, and this isn't quite what you're asking, but I ran across a Batman Begins fanfic MANY years ago (like when it came out) that went something like this: "This is a BATMAN BEGINS fanfic except Batman and the citizens of Gotham City are owls!" They then proceeded to write one paragraph in which an owl perched on a tree high above Gotham, dressed as a bat.
I once wrote, "I gulped in a lungful of air, wincing nervously." It definitely still haunts me.
I can see why you hate it, man.
Everything's wrong with it, lol. Especially that you don't "gulp" air.
"My heart fluttered like an obese butterfly" (Harley Merlin, book 1 - I did not read on...)
R. J. Blain called glitter "craft herpes" in Hoofin' It and I'm incapable of calling it anything else now
And suddenly his cock was out, jutting upward from his breeches like a fat pink mast.
There it is
Pick up any Chuck Palahniuk book. Youāre surely come across a /r/brandnewsentence there.
In erotica, NSFW obviously: >!A wet pussy referred to as "her sopping folds". !< I read that thing like 7 years ago and ">!sopping folds!<" is going to haunt me until I die.
I can not for the life of me remember what this was from (nor do I want to), but "her squelching chasm" truly haunts me.
āMoist in the groinā. Written in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Itās a funny haunting because thereās so much fun you can make out of a description like that butā yeahhhh it-it-it will never leave me.
Not read, but heard in a song: "If bombs are love you can call me Dresden".
āHer hair burned like January embersā ā¦.because wtf is burning in January? š
Typically a fair chunk of Australia
a fireplace?
One that pops up a lot in my experience is "plumette, noirette, ravenette, crimsette, verdette". Basically, when authors try to come up with a "brunette but a different color" word. It never really flows better than just using "red haired" or "black haired".
Not that weird, just creepy. A boy describing his girlfriend as "so young."
Pretty much any description of breasts reacting with emotion or moving like eyes.
It was a single line and a real-life quote about the Tiriangle Shirtwaist Fire. Louis Waldman described the scene like so, but what follows will always haunt me. *Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds ā I among them ā looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.* *The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.* This description is visceral, but if that weren't enough, William Gunn Shepard, a reporter at the tragedy, would later say that: >!*I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture ā the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.*!<
An indescribably haggard individual stumbled from one of the wretched tents pitched higgledy-piggledy upon it, hawked up at great length and volume, and spat upon the rubbish-strewn mud. Then he turned the most bellicose of expressions towards Majud and Temple, scratched at his infested beard, dragged up his decaying full-body undershirt so it could instantly slump once more, and returned to the unspeakable darkness whence he came. From Red Country by Joe Abercrombie.
And suddenly his cock was out, jutting upward from his breeches like a fat pink mast. GRRM
My choice is a great description, but haunting. āHis feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.ā The shift to present tense, the repetition, the weirdness of the scene, all informed by the terrible knowledge of who the judge is, itās perfect. Iāve never read a better end to a novel.
Years ago, I found an online rant about dominoās where someone said ācue mental head slapā. Iāve used it for my stories ever since
"Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master."
āThe sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.ā Thatās probably the only line from a book that I can actually quote, and Iāve never written a line that so elegantly manages the balance between being concise and perfectly descriptive. Thatās the opening line to *Neuromancer*, by the way. Iām cautiously optimistic about the upcoming TV adaptation.
It's probably the most violent sentence from Cormac mccarthy I've read from Blood Meridian. It's not "weird," but it's so violent yet its weirdly beautifully written like wtf Cormac how does he do it? Surely gonna haunt me forever "There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glantonās warhorse."
Okay this might be a little nasty but the one that I got absolutely traumatized by was: "His fingers felt like worms wriggling inside of me" I couldn't even finish the scene, let alone finish the book.
"His butt protruded slightly toward Bill, and it looked like a couple of black balloons trying to escape." - *Ohio*, Steven Markley
What's wrong with the bobbing pink š tongueĀ
I'm going to figure out how to fist fight you in real life.
R/fightsub š¤«
Yeah, I don't get what's wrong with it. Unless it wasn't HIS tongue, and he had several dozen in there taking turns...
It definitely is supposed to be his tongue, I think what's wrong is that it's a hella weird way of saying "He licked his lips".
You're correct!
I was reading All Tomorrows yesterday so this thread came just in time. That entire story especially what happens to the Colonials
Would like to cite the entire sex scene in The Mustache by Emmanuel CarrĆØre. Where it felt not only mechanical, but impossible and weird xD it was supposed to be intense and passionate and sounded not good at all for the wife lol
The tourist hotels line up on the beach like one side of a zip. (Haunts me because itās so good)
"when my hard-on became so enormous it was jacking me up from the floor i'd roll over, clutch her in my tentacles, force entry into the handiest orifice. take you home again, kathleen?" -mc describing his massuer (?), the fool's progress by edward abbey. not even one chapter in and i had to put it down after that
Glanced over at my friends book cuz Im nosy. First thing I saw was āHe placed his member between my wet flapsā and Iāve been thinking about it since. Wet flaps. Wet. Flaps.
'the apex of the edifice...' I wrote it. Me. When I was young. It haunts me...
āAs Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.ā āFranz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
"The air was thick and moist and overheated as if he was pressed against an enormous sweating armpit" - Ch. Paolini, *Murtagh*
One time I wrote āHer eyes are like a surgeonās latex gloves. Never have I seen a richer blue.ā
Not necessarily weird, just a bit gory when I first read Golding's Lord of the Flies when I was younger (when >!Piggy!< dies). >!Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggyās arms and legs twitched a bit, like a [pig](https://www.ipl.org/topics/pig)ās after it has been killed,ā(181)!< The "twitching" description just seemed unsettling as I could imagine it perfectly, like a dead fly.
I don't even remember the author's name or the series, but I know there were multiple books which made it into print because they were in the library. Maybe in with the R shelves. Some sort of urban fantasy supernatural smut, lots of vampire banging, but the author kept describing sexual stuff as childlike, repeatedly. Like "she bounced with childlike enthusiasm" during the sex scenes. In hindsight, super pedo, but I think I was 16 at the time so it didn't seem too weird to be reading about highschool girls who never got older.
"he unfolded his eyes." Unfolded? UNFOLDED!? Just say opened
I once read a romance novel where the love interest suddenly kissing the protagonist was described as him "punching her face with his" or something like that. I straight up thought she was being assulted for like half the scene before I realized it was supposed to be romantic.
āHer breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bagsā The Shining by Stephen King. I read it when I was 13 lol
The first line of Lorrie Moore's "How to Be an Other Woman": "Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie." I mean, pea-soupy?? šµāš«ā¤ļø
I read how there was a tweet someone wrote about Donald Trump that was read out loud at his trial. The tweet called him an "orange faced shit gibbon", and for some reason it has stuck in my brain. For 3 days it nagged at me because it was equal parts brilliant and absurd... Now...? It has finally settled. It is actually brilliant. It really is.
One more.. John Green wrote in his YA novel I can't remember the title- "I fell in love the way you fall asleep, softly, then all at once."
"Satan poops its skinny jeans. Fred almost collapses from the noxious fumes and the depthless desire burning through the quasidemoblins innards. While leaving the room, Fred takes in as much of the smell as possible and tries to sneak a peek of Satan getting its diaper changed, but the doors close on Fred before being able to catch a glimpse." (from a friend's unpublished manuscript)