You know how sometimes you get lines from songs stuck in your head? Not necessarily the music, but the lines themselves. Well I do anyway. Lines like “And still we will be here, standing like statues” or “do you believe in magic?”, though they’re much better with the music to go with them, and when they’re sung in a certain way. Lately I’ve had a few literary lines stuck in my head, two of them from James Joyce, one from Simon Armitage. Sometimes the best sentiments come from the fewest words, and some quotes are brilliant not because of what they say, whether they’re a pithy little aphorism or a well-put piece of rhetoric, but by what they suggest, and how they seem to carry a whole weight of ideas that is much greater than the sum of their parts.

Without further ado in this short, sharp little post, the three lines I have stuck in my head, that I thought I would share are:

i. Yes I said yes I will yes.

This, as everyone really ought to know, is the final, triumphant line of Joyce’s Ulysses. I love the emphatic expression of affirmation it embodies. It’s only seven words, and yet it is so enthusiastic in conveying its message. It’s so well-balanced as well, the way two words separate each of the three yeses. It’s probably even my favourite line in the whole novel.

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I recently read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in a single day, firstly because it’s short, and secondly because it was really good. It had a wonderful immediacy that very few novels do, certainly not the long, slow novels I’ve been reading lately, like Crime and Punishment and Night and Day. Particularly surprising was the accessibility of the work, for something that was written two-and-a-half centuries ago, a little after Shakespeare was alive.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

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