{"id":391,"date":"2008-06-18T06:46:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-18T06:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/omeoflittlefaith\/2008\/06\/my-literary-earworms.html"},"modified":"2008-06-18T06:46:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-18T06:46:00","slug":"my-literary-earworms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2008\/06\/my-literary-earworms.html","title":{"rendered":"My Literary Earworms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Any lover of books and stories<\/span> has certain lines that stick with them — phrases and sentences that, for whatever reason, embed themselves in your consciousness like a literary earworm<\/a>. (An earworm is a snippet of a song that gets “stuck in your head.”)<\/p>\n

There are a few lines I know by heart that float through my brain at least every few weeks or so. When they do, it’s always a good thing. A good memory. A good thought. Here are some of them…<\/p>\n

1. “I am haunted by waters.”<\/span><\/p>\n

(Opening line of A River Runs Through It,<\/span><\/a> by Norman Maclean. Probably my favorite line in all of literature, because it resonates with me on some deep, watery level I can’t really explain. I think of it every time I step into a trout stream, or encounter a waterfall, or see the ocean.)<\/p>\n

2. “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”<\/span><\/p>\n

(Sam, after being rescued by the eagles, in The Return of the King, <\/span><\/a>by J.R.R. Tolkien. I sure hope Sam is right.)<\/p>\n

3. “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “Don’t you hear anything Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”<\/span><\/p>\n

(About Aslan, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe<\/span><\/a> by C.S. Lewis. This one’s probably a cliche, but there you go.)<\/p>\n

4. “Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing…”<\/span><\/p>\n

(About protagonist Hazel Motes, in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood<\/a>. I love that image…being pursued into a dark uncertainty by the “wild ragged” Jesus.)<\/p>\n

5. “In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon, and there were three little bears sitting on chairs…”<\/span><\/p>\n

(The opening lines to Goodnight Moon,<\/span><\/a> by Margaret Wise Brown. This was both of my kids’ first favorite book, and I’ve probably read it aloud at least 500 times.)<\/p>\n

These are mine. What are your literary earworms?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Any lover of books and stories has certain lines that stick with them — phrases and sentences that, for whatever reason, embed themselves in your consciousness like a literary earworm. (An earworm is a snippet of a song that gets “stuck in your head.”) There are a few lines I know by heart that float…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lists","category-reading"],"yoast_head":"\nMy Literary Earworms - O Me of Little Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2008\/06\/my-literary-earworms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Literary Earworms - O Me of Little Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Any lover of books and stories has certain lines that stick with them — phrases and sentences that, for whatever reason, embed themselves in your consciousness like a literary earworm. 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