Last year, I wrote a post sharing the best passages from books I’d read in 2023. I enjoyed writing it so much that I decided to write up a new version for 2025. Again, I read over twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, last year. As I read, I tried to pay attention to the authors’ techniques: how they implemented storytelling principles, how they handled transitions, how they crafted their opening sentences and concluding paragraphs, how they wrote captivating descriptions, and much more.
When I came across a paragraph that struck me with its eloquence, I wrote it down. That helped me study it on an even deeper level and absorb the author’s techniques for structure and style.
In today’s post, I’m sharing five of the best passages (in no particular order) that I collected this past year and what I learned from them, focusing in particular on their powerful descriptions. Let’s dive in.
(I’ve also made a video version of this post that you can watch below.)
1. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
The first passage comes from Ernest Hemingway’s wonderful memoir A Moveable Feast. In 1956, Hemingway discovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored way back in 1928 at the Hotel Ritz Paris. Inside were notebooks that he had kept in the 1920s. He decided to use these notebooks to write up a memoir of all of his experiences when he was a young writer in Paris.
The book is a fascinating account of Hemingway’s Paris years and friendships with other famous writers.
I read this memoir for the first time many years ago, but I picked it up again one day last year and re-read several of the anecdotes. I was particularly struck by these lines of description, taken from a scene where Hemingway is writing in a cafe:
A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I always love studying how authors describe people in their writing. Some prefer detailed descriptions, others just a quick sketch. Hemingway usually prefers the latter. But his details are so precise that we are able to construct a vivid image of this girl in our minds.
Hemingway uses two similes to bring this image to life. The first simile is “a face fresh as a newly minted coin” and the second is “her hair was black as a crow’s wing.” With the first simile, he adds a qualification to further emphasize the girl’s prettiness and to introduce additional details (“if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin”). It makes the person feel even more real.
Steal this formula for your next character description: Simile + Qualification.
For more tips on crafting vivid character descriptions, check out my video where I analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald’s techniques for vivid character descriptions in The Great Gatsby. And speaking of Fitzgerald, let’s jump into the next passage.
2. Against the Current by Frances Kroll Ring
This second passage is also from a memoir, Against the Current: As I remember F. Scott Fitzgerald by Frances Kroll Ring.
As a fan of Fitzgerald’s novels, I was excited to discover this book this past year, and I sped through it over several days in December.
During the last 20 months of his life, Fitzgerald hired 22-year-old Frances Kroll to act as his personal secretary. She typed up the drafts of his final novel, The Last Tycoon, though he died before he could finish it.
Many years later Kroll wrote this memoir about her time working with Fitzgerald. It’s a fascinating read as she shared a peek into Fitzgerald’s writing process and how he planned and plotted his work.
There was one passage in particular where Kroll described Fitzgerald a short time before he died that I found particularly haunting.
He no longer had a desire to attract attention to himself except through his writing. He did want to secure his reputation with his peers and his readers and he hoped the new book would do this for him. Yet despite the mood of calm, I have a dark impression that lingers—of a walk we took up the street at one day’s end. I was going to my car; he was going on to Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard, just a couple of blocks away. He was wearing a dark topcoat and a grey homburg hat. As we kept pace, I looked over at him and was chilled by his image, like a shadowy figure in an old photograph. His outfit and pallor were alien to the style and warmth of Southern California—as if he were not at home here, had just stopped off and was dressed to leave on the next train.
Fitzgerald’s death came as a shock to Kroll, but in this eloquent passage she reveals that she had a presentiment of what was to come.
Though this scene is drawn from real life, Kroll is careful to only include the details that will enhance the mood and atmosphere. For instance, she writes that the scene took place at one day’s end—a subtle echo of Fitzgerald’s own life, nearing its end. She also highlights the somber, almost funereal, colors of his clothing.
And note the similes she adds that further emphasize her feeling of foreboding. Fitzgerald looks like a “shadowy figure in an old photograph” and as if he were “dressed to leave on the next train.” That last simile conjured in my mind the image of a man on the brink of departure, perhaps with one foot on the train station platform and the other already on the train. It encapsulates that feeling of helplessness and deep sorrow when a loved one is sick and slipping away before our eyes.
This passage is a fantastic example of how to use similes in our writing to set the mood. Kroll introduces imagery that already has a specific connotation of melancholy in our mind: old photographs, departing trains. Her similes infuse the scene with a profound feeling of unease, allowing us to fully experience the disquiet she felt that night.
3. “The Final Problem” by Arthur Conan Doyle
The next passage is from Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Final Problem,” in which he infamously killed off his detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes falls to his death while fighting his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, over the Reichenbach Falls. However, public outcry was so great that Doyle was forced to resurrect the detective in the short story “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
I’d read nearly all the Holmes stories many years ago but decided to pick up a collection of the stories and re-read “The Final Problem” after watching an adaptation by Granada Television starring Jeremy Brett. The screenwriter did an excellent job staying quite faithful to the original stories and even including direct quotations. In the episode, Dr. Watson delivered a line describing the falls. It was beautifully worded so I went to see if it was a direct quote.
It was! But the rest of the description (that had probably been cut out for time) was even more magnificent.
It is indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.
I love how vividly Doyle brings the Reichenbach Falls to life with his marvelous imagery (he had seen the Falls in person while traveling in Germany and Switzerland). This is a fantastic paragraph to study to see how we can strengthen our description of a setting.
First, Doyle uses many sensory words to make us feel like we are standing right there with Holmes and Watson, looking down at the roaring falls as well. Sensory words are the descriptive words that apply to the five senses (sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound). Doyle incorporates three of the five senses in this quoted passage:
- Words related to sight or appearance (these can also include words related to motion) — for example, swollen, melting, plunges, coal-black
- Words related to touch — burning, boiling
- Words related to sound — hissing, clamor, shout, booming.
If you’re attempting to make a passage of writing vivid for your readers, try including more sensory words.
Doyle also incorporates a fantastic simile, “like the smoke from a burning house.” He doesn’t just describe what the falls look like—he also conveys the emotional impact they have, writing how they can “turn a man giddy” with their “constant whirl and clamor.” To emphasize the Falls’ grandeur, Doyle also uses personification, describing the “half-human shout” that amplifies their imposing, almost living presence.
4. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The fourth passage comes from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite books, but I’d started and never finished The Three Musketeers many years ago. I decided to pick it up this past year to practice my French, and I was quickly caught up in the fast-paced, thrilling story set in 1620s France.
Unlike many authors of the 1800s, in The Three Musketeers, Dumas avoids long descriptions and focuses mainly on action and dialogue that move the story along quickly. However, he is a brilliant writer, and when he does utilize similes, metaphors, or other imagery, they are always masterful, like in this excellent passage where Dumas is describing the fate of several villains in the story:
Then those who dwelt in Bonacieux’s unfortunate house, together with the nearest neighbors, heard loud cries, stamping of feet, clashing of swords, and breaking of furniture. A moment after, those who, surprised by this tumult, had gone to their windows to learn the cause of it, saw the door open, and four men, clothed in black, not come out of it, but fly, like so many frightened crows, leaving on the ground and on the corners of the furniture, feathers from their wings; that is to say, patches of their clothes and fragments of their cloaks.
In the first sentence, Dumas uses a literary technique I like to call the detailed list. He doesn’t just say that the neighbors heard a ruckus from the house next door. Instead, he highlights each noise with sensory words: loud cries, stamping of feet, clashing of swords, and breaking of furniture.
The second sentence is long, but beautifully punctuated. Note that Dumas uses hyperbole (an exaggerated statement to create emphasis) by telling us that the men flew out of the house. Of course, it is impossible that they were flying like birds, but another definition of fly is to move or be hurled quickly through the air. That means that Dumas may be implying that one of the heroes of the story is hurling them out of the house. Picture that as a slapstick scene from a movie. Or perhaps they are simply fleeing as fast as they can.
Dumas continues the picture with the wonderful simile “like so many frightened crows leaving on the ground and on the corners of the furniture, feathers from their wings.”
As we’ve seen several times already in the previous passages I’ve highlighted, similes are a fantastic way to make our writing richer by giving the reader a stronger visual image. They can also emphasize the mood of the story: here, the crow simile reinforces the humor of the scene and the terror of the men.
5. Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas
I enjoyed The Three Musketeers so much that I decided to continue reading the Musketeers series (known as The d’Artagnan Romances), and this past year I also read the sequel: Twenty Years After. I loved this paragraph from the beginning of the story:
Another memory still saddened Raoul: on their arrival at Louvres, he had seen, hidden behind a screen of poplars, a little chateau which so vividly recalled that of La Valliere to his mind that he halted for nearly ten minutes to gaze at it, and resumed his journey with a sigh too abstracted even to reply to Olivain’s respectful inquiry about the cause of so much fixed attention. The aspect of external objects is often a mysterious guide communicating with the fibers of memory and sometimes awakening them in spite of ourselves; this thread, like that of Ariadne, when once unraveled will conduct one through a labyrinth of thought, in which one loses one’s self in endeavoring to follow that phantom of the past which we call memory.
In this meditative passage, Dumas zooms out from his narrative about Raoul to explore an abstract idea: how external objects can trigger memories. I discussed in my video about the ladder of abstraction how writers can imbue their writing with deeper meaning by introducing philosophical questions and problems that are universal to readers in all times and places.
We can all relate to Raoul’s experience of seeing an object and being reminded of the past. Dumas personifies these objects as guides and makes an allusion to the thread of Ariadne. In the Greek myth, Ariadne gave the hero Theseus a sword to kill the minotaur in the labyrinth and a golden thread to help him find his way out afterward.
Allusion, as Dumas demonstrates, is a powerful literary technique. By referencing well-known myths, stories, historical figures, places, or events, an author invites readers to draw connections between the allusion and the narrative. It makes the writing thought-provoking, enriching it with another layer of meaning. For example, an author might compare the courage of their protagonist to David challenging the giant Goliath or star-crossed lovers to Romeo and Juliet.
Dumas’s allusion to Ariadne’s thread and “the labyrinth of thought” provides vivid images that prevent his philosophizing from becoming too abstract and slowing down the narrative. This imagery ties back to one of the themes of the novel which is all about this “phantom of the past”: how actions can have consequences that reverberate down through generations.
Look for ways that you can use allusions in your own writing to connect your work to timeless ideas. As Dumas showed, this is a wonderful way to incorporate universal themes and messages into our writing to make it more memorable so that our stories connect with our readers on a deeper level.
The Takeaway
From all of these passages, I learned wonderful techniques for making my writing more powerful. I hope they help you to take your writing to the next level too.
Be sure to check out my video on close reading where you’ll discover how you can dive into a well-written passage of a book to identify techniques you can use in your own writing.
Let’s close with this quote by Ray Bradbury on the importance of reading for writers:
If you want to write, if you want to create…You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy head.
Have you read any of these books? What were your favorite books read last year? Let me know in the comments.
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Thank you! Wishing you much success with your writing projects this year! God bless.
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