Do particular lines from novels speak to you? Bowl you over with their power?

The lines “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” from

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut keep rattling around in my brain. They are (as I remember it) the only first-person lines in the book. Vonnegut toys with the fiction/nonfiction barrier with a fictional account of someone who lived through a real event (the Dresden bombing). Those three lines bring an immediacy, a reality to it. Those three lines suck you right into the reality he constructed. I love the whole book, but those three lines will live with me forever.

I hope to someday write a line like that. What lines speak to you (and why)?

Related articles

• “Slaughterhouse – Five” by Kurt Vonnegut (inbetweenthepagesofbooks.wordpress.com)
• Reading by Ear: Slaughterhouse-Five (theliteraryomnivore.wordpress.com)
• Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five (mascoleblanc.wordpress.com)