A fun reading meme, gacked from intertext

List some of your favorite words:

Sursurration. Thurible (I obviously like my 'urr' sounds). Blythe. Shilpit. In German: 'Habseligkeiten', in which I am in good company, as I think it won a poll for 'best German word'.

What’s your favorite maxim or proverb?

"Peccata fortide" (M. Luther.) Though I frequently fail to live up to it!

What’s your favorite quotation?

Gosh. Tricky. Favourite in what sense? If we're talking about Inspiring words, then I like to remind myself of Tennyson, the more so as I am by sentiment if not by politics a total conservative:

"The old order changeth, giving place to new
And God reveals Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." (Anglo-Catholic papers please copy!)

Or, when I'm trying to persuade myself to write:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

WH Auden, from 'In Memory of WB Yeats'

I also tend to quote Capt. Renaud a lot ("I'm shocked! Shocked!"). And I've also thought that the final words of Old Who have something magnificent about them: “There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the seas sleep and the river dreams. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere, there is danger … And somewhere the tea is getting cold. Come on Ace, we've got work to do.”

What’s your favorite first line of a novel?

Despite my attempts to find something obscure, Intertext already named one of my favourites: the maginificent beginning of Charles Williams' "War in Heaven": "The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse". Without being particularly original, I shall also name Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle": "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" and Rose Macauley's "Towers of Trebizond" (which for years and years I thought was a school-story): "Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high mass."

Give an example of a piece of description that’s really pleased you in your reading lately:

As ever, I enjoyed the descriptions of the Hamburg U-Bahn and of the smell of Greifswald in the early fifties in Hermann Kant's "Die Aula", but as I think only a minority of my readers read German, I shall only post it if requested!

Which five writers do you particularly admire for their use of language?

WH Auden. Wolfram von Eschenbach (she said, pretentiously). Hermann Kant again, actually. Patrick O'Brian. John Buchan, especially the different levels of dialect.

Like intertext, I also admire Reginald Hill very much.

And are there writers whose style you really dislike?

I've never been able to take Virginia Woolf in large doses, though it's all very impressive. (I think the question's more interesting if applied to GOOD writers, rather than hacks like Dan Brown or Jenkins and LeHaye).

What’s the key to really fine writing, in your opinion?

A good ear, and a sense of tact and proportion.

Also: apologies for accidentally posting a half c&p'd entry which was partially Intertexts, and I also have to share this wonderful take-off of Moon landing hoax theories:
http://www.stuffucanuse.com/fake_moon_landings/moon_landings.htm