Best passage from an autobiographical work

FoxT

Autobiographical works, at their best are inspiring, but never have an air of condescension or superiority. They are interesting, entertaining, reassuring, and also challenging, as they often tell us that our personal experiences are not unique.

What is your favourite passage from an autobiographical work?

It doesn't have to be from an autobiography - a travelogue, for example, would be fine - please quote author & publisher.

My kickoff passage:

" Our new shop, which was to end up as a caribbean shebeen, was very well patronised by Moss Siders who preferred to do their drinking at home. Their respectability was sometimes suspect: one old man came every evening with a jug for the supper ale and could be seen going down an entry, where he would drink off a portion and make up the volume by urinating in the jug. When he was too old for this regular errand, his family complained about a loss of strength in the beer"

"Little Wilson & Big God"

Anthony Burgess, Heinemann, London, 1987.


-FoxT

WinstonSmith

MacNeice, Louis. The Strings Are False. London: Faber & Faber, 2007. Print.
Talking about his childhood memories and holidays:
[38-39] "Going to Wales was too far back- it was walking along white planks, they may have been deck or they may have been esplanade, there was hot buttered toast too and hooters and buckets- but Portstewart is the holiday I remember. We went there twice but the times have fused together. It is a little seaside resort on the north coast of county Antrim a few miles west of Portrush. On the train I was anguished because I had forgotten my toy boat but when we got out at the station a thrill came up in my stomach because I was really There. Outside the station there was a flowering bush of buddleia and my father produced a little bag of preserved ginger. The ginger was sweet too though it bit, brought tears to the eyes, but the buddleia was sweet only, sweet. Only where was the sea? I might have cried because the sea was not at the station but they said it would only be a little while now and I pattered along the road, my mouth full of ginger, and suddenly around a corner or over a crest came a strong salt breeze and a rich smell of herring and there down below us was blueness, lumbering up against the wall of the fisherman's quay, ever so never so blue, exploding in white and in gulls."