Mine would be a passage from the book *Ribsy* by Beverly Cleary. Ribsy is a dog who gets lost somehow, and at one point, a nice elderly lady invites him in because he looks hungry; she doesn’t have any dog food; so she makes him scrambled eggs and talks to him for a while. I remember how nice that sounded to me, to be a hungry dog trying to get home, who someone was kind enough to cooked scrambled eggs for.
by Hoppy_Croaklightly
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Any passage from the *Sherlock Holmes* stories, where Holmes and Watson are in their 221B Baker Street flat discussing recent events and interesting cases, perhaps over a nice meal provided by Mrs Hudson.
German has the word Fernweh –
Farsickness or longing for an unseen place/place you’ve never been.
That’s cool.
I want to stay at the Prancing Pony, drink a bitter with Barliman, and have a pipe in front of the fire in the common room.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Anne of Green gables when she describes the white way of delight. I to this day, 45 years later want to drive down that lane in a horse and buggy to green gables.
The “Avenue,” so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle.
Its beauty seemed to strike the child dumb. She leaned back in the buggy, her thin hands clasped before her, her face lifted rapturously to the white splendor above. Even when they had passed out and were driving down the long slope to Newbridge she never moved or spoke. Still with rapt face she gazed afar into the sunset west, with eyes that saw visions trooping splendidly across that glowing background.
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/anneofgreengables/full-text/chapter-ii/
The Cleary books are great for how Portland is / was. Clifford Simak for southwest Wisconsin is highly evocative.
In the same vein as yours, a scene from Dear Mr. Henshaw, also by Beverly Cleary. A boy sits in a warm car with his mom, looking out at the beach, with rain rolling down the windows. They’re sharing KFC, and using the chicken bones to eat the mashed potatoes, because the restaurant forgot their forks. Such a cozy scene.
All of James Herriott’s books make his little town sound so delightful. After his main series took off, he told his son he was thinking of writing a local guide. His son said he thought it was a nonstarter of an idea. Writing in his father’s biography, he said “it’s a good thing he didn’t listen to me, because people still show up here holding their copies.” The All Creatures series gave people a desire to go, so when James Herriott’s Yorkshire gave them a road map, they showed up in droves, and still do.
> The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.
not to make this an all LoTR thread but this one hits all those spots for me
The Wrinkle in Time kitchen scene when Charles Wallace makes cocoa and sandwiches for his mom and sister, and there’s a thunderstorm, and Mrs. Whatsit blows in. I’ve always wanted to be in that kitchen.
“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel.”
“Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by myself under the name of Saunders.”
In its roots, the word “nostalgia” means a pained longing to return home, and my childhood books feel like home.
Puddleglum’s speech to the witch.
maybe not in the same vein as the other answers, but it makes me want to believe in and fight for Narnia…
In The Goldfinch, the scenes in the mostly abandoned Vegas suburb… it’s not nostalgia exactly, but it made me ache. The boredom of these two boys, the heat, the way I imagined the stillness.
I have aspired to be the father from Danny, the Champion of the World for the last 35 years. He wasn’t perfect, except to Danny, which was the only thing that mattered.
Ribsy was the second book I ever read. My teacher got it for me. She have all of us Beverly Cleary books. I love it still, I never hear anyone mention it.
Anyway anytime the shire is described, I get taken away. All I want it to live in the shire
Most of The Wind in the Willows.
Wind in the Willows
When James Herriott describes the countryside as he drives to someone’s property.
Not really a passage but the little mundane scenes in many books by Murakami. Especially the one scene where Kafka stays in an old cabin in the woods and I envied him for it. He really brings out those warm and fuzzy feelings.
I felt that way about the Anne of Green Gables series.
The beginning of the Golden Compass, just the whole description of Lyra’s life in the college.
I always wanted to live in a museum like the kids in The Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler.
Ocean at the End of the Lane
Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is a gorgeous ode to his childhood. It feels so honest and insightful in its representation of what a summer vacation meant for a 12-year-old boy in 1928 Midwestern America. I was generations away from being born, and have never spent a day living anywhere near there, but I immediately *knew* exactly what it was like to have lived that life. As someone who picked this book up after enjoying Bradbury’s sci-fi writing, it was nothing like what I expected, and yet exactly what I needed.
Maybe a weird choice but some of Bukowski’s poetry
“we were in a small shack in
central L.A.
there was a woman in bed
with me
and there was a very large
dog
at the foot of the bed
and as they slept
I listened to them
breathe
and I thought, they depend
upon me.
how very curious.
I still had that thought
in the morning
after our breakfast
while backing the car
out of the drive
the woman and the dog
on the front step
sitting and watching
me
as I laughed and waved
and as she smiled and
waved
and the dog looked
as I backed into the
street and disappeared
into the city.
now tonight
I still think of them
sitting on that
front step
it’s like an old
movie– 35 years
old– that nobody ever
saw or understood
but me
and even though the
critics would dub it
ordinary
I like it
very much.”
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The description of that huge wooden armoire, filled with heavy and long fur coats, that gave way to pine boughs and then suddenly, the snow. I cannot tell you how many times I crawled into the closets of friends of my parents, because I just knew one of those closets was going to be the secret passageway to Narnia.
Eight long trestle tables had been laid in a sprawling octagon, covered in the finest white linen, overlaid with pastel-hued mats of woven rushes. Intricate flower arrangements trailed night-scented stock, roses, pansies, kingcups, jasmine, lupins and ferns at the junction of each table. Places were set out and named in neatly printed small scrolls, each of which doubled as a napkin. Bowls of hot scented flower waters steamed fragrantly, awaiting the advent of sticky paws.
There was no top table or concession to rank, and the humblest sat alongside the greatest, squirrels rubbed paws with mice, otters rubbed tails with voles, and moles tried not to rub shoulders with hedgehogs. Everything was perfect, except for the food. . . . That was beyond mere words.
Salads of twelve different types, ranging from beetroot to radish, right through many varieties of lettuce and including fennel, dandelion, tomato, young onion, carrot, leek, corn – every sort of vegetable imaginable, cut, shredded, diced or whole. These were backed up with the cheeses, arranged in wedge patterns of red, yellow and white, studded with nuts, herbs and apple. Loaves were everywhere, small brown cobs with seeds on top, long white batons with glazed crusts, early harvest loaves shaped like cornstooks, teabread, nutbread, spicebread and soft flowerbread for infants.
The drinks were set out in pitchers and ewers, some in open bowls with floating mint leaves, October ale, fresh milk, blackcurrant wine, strawberry cordial, nutbrown beer, raspberry fizz, elderberry wine, damson juice, herb tea and cold cider. Then there were the cakes, tarts, jellies and sweets. Raspberry muffins, blueberry scones, redcurrant jelly, Abbot’s cake, fruitcake, iced cake, shortbread biscuits, almond wafers, fresh cream, sweet cream, whipped cream, pouring cream, honeyed cream, custardy cream, Mrs. Churchmouse’s bell tower pudding, Mrs. Bankvole’s six-layer trifle, Cornflower’s gatehouse gateau, Sister Rose’s sweetmeadow custard with honeyglazed pears, Brother Rufus’s wildgrape woodland pie with quince and hazelnut sauce. To name but a few. . . .
-Mattimeo: A Tale of Redwall-
This is my favorite section from 11.22.63 by Stephen King. It describes 5 weeks in Maine in 1958
Those five weeks may have been the best of my life. I saw no one but the couple who ran the local store, where I bought a few simple groceries twice a week, and Mr. Winchell, who owned the cabins. He stopped in on Sundays to make sure I was okay and having a good time. Every time he asked, I told him I was, and it was no lie. He gave me a key to the equipment shed, and I took a canoe out every morning and evening when the water was calm. I remember watching the full moon rise silently over the trees on one of those evenings, and how it beat a silver avenue across the water while the reflection of my canoe hung below me like a drowned twin. A loon cried somewhere, and was answered by a pal or a mate. Soon others joined the conversation. I shipped my paddle and just sat there three hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and listening to the loons converse. I remember thinking if there was a heaven somewhere and it wasn’t like this, then I didn’t want to go.
The fall colors began to bloom—first timid yellow, then orange, then blazing, strumpet red as autumn burned away another Maine summer. There were cardboard boxes filled with coverless paperbacks at the market, and I must have read three dozen or more: mysteries by Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, Chester Himes, and Richard S. Prather; steamy melodramas like Peyton Place and A Stone for Danny Fisher; westerns by the score; and one science-fiction novel called The Lincoln Hunters, which concerned time-travelers trying to record a “forgotten” speech by Abraham Lincoln.
When I wasn’t reading or canoeing, I was walking in the woods. Long autumn afternoons, most hazy and warm. Dusty gilded light slanting down through the trees. At night, a quiet so vast it seemed almost to reverberate. Few cars passed on Route 114, and after ten o’clock or so there were none at all. After ten, the part of the world where I had come to rest belonged only to the loons and the wind in the fir trees.
The Secret Garden
>”It’s—it’s not the sea, is it?” said Mary, looking round at her companion.
>”No, not it,” answered Mrs. Medlock. “Nor it isn’t fields nor mountains, it’s just miles and miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep.”
and when she’s actually in the garden
>The sun was shining inside the four walls and the high arch of blue sky over this particular piece of Misselthwaite seemed even more brilliant and soft than it was over the moor. The robin flew down from his tree-top and hopped about or flew after her from one bush to another. He chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing her things. Everything was strange and silent and she seemed to be hundreds of miles away from any one, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all. All that troubled her was her wish that she knew whether all the roses were dead, or if perhaps some of them had lived and might put out leaves and buds as the weather got warmer. She did not want it to be a quite dead garden. If it were a quite alive garden, how wonderful it would be, and what thousands of roses would grow on every side!
I blame Frances Hodgson Burnett for my childhood obsession with the North York Moors that’s lasted til today. I’ll be moving to England within the year so hopefully it will be much more accessible for me to visit c: