Memorable Passage

Post a passage (probably no more than a paragraph or so) from a book that was memorable to you. Type the passage in word for word and add some of your own thoughts (250 words or more--not counting the passage itself) before and/or after, explaining why this particular set of words caught your attention or has stayed in your memory.  Title this post Memorable Passage.  Include an image with this post, too.

I used to write quite a bit on my own blog about what I read, if nothing else just to remember, but often to reflect on words that stuck with me. If you are so inclined or need some ideas about books to read or what you might write about reading, you can check out my posts here and here and here and here and here.  Also here and here.  But that's totally optional.

Here is an example of a Memorable Passage post:

Today I finished Elizabeth Berg's Dream When You're Feeling Blue, a book I found at the thrift store a couple of weeks ago. This story follows 3 beautiful sisters and the various soldiers they correspond with during the war. Wouldn't I love to have all the letters to and from my grandfathers? Who wrote to them? I especially noted a passage summing up what one soldier had written to oldest sister Kitty:

"He thought times like this could galvanize people into a certain kind of unity but could also make for unexpected changes in the individual, for strange contradictions. He said he himself had begun to feel the need to be alone most of the time. And yet he also felt a kind of love and compassion for humanity far greater than what he'd ever felt before. He found it hard to blame the war on any one person. He thought that, despite witnessing--and taking part in--such unimaginable violence, most soldiers would come home from the war wanting never to hurt anything again.

"He told her about boys who came back from the battle vacant-eyed, their hands shaking, who in a few hours' time were ready to smile and joke again and then eager to rejoin those at the front. He said that extinguishing life in another seemed to make you unspeakably grateful for your own, indeed for life in general. For a few hours after a battle, Hank said, everything the men looked at seemed caressed by their eyes. They were such young boys. They were such old men."

I'll be thinking of William Archie Curtis and Julian Jasper Cowan when we celebrate the 4th this weekend, as I do on any holiday or moment with a patriotic slant. I'll never really know what those two went through, and I'll never be able to really define how I feel about what they did, the young boys they were, the old men I watched them become. But I'll think of them kindly and generously, as Hank described, as men who saw and felt so much pain that they never wanted to hurt anything again. My whole life they've been so very kind, so very generous, to me.