Fave one liner from a book?

What a wonderful thread! Love all the Pratchett, Susan Cooper, P&P, Hitchhikers, Harry Potter & LPW already quoted.

I can't believe no one has quoted any Yeats!

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you / And loved the sorrows of your changing face" (When You Are Old)

"I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams" (He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven)

"Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to burn?" (No Second Troy)

And a couple from novels:

"If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law." (The Dark is Rising)

"I feel like the word shatter." (The Handmaid's Tale - I know that feeling!)

"I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it" (Hawksmoor)

"She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season."

P G Woodhouse, Carry On, Jeeves

That's lovely SpecialAgent - so sweet

Many other beautiful ones too

"I was a flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes"

Molly Bloom from Ulysses, James Joyce

I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be.

• Love you Forever This is MUMMY'S favourite night time story

'It looks like a penis only smaller' think it was the first Jack Reacher novel

"Jesus watches from the wall, his face as cold as stone, if he loves me, like they tell me, why do I feel all alone"
'Carrie' Stephen King

Have just remembered this, which I want reading at my funeral!

"When you look up at the sky at night, since I shall be living on one of them and laughing on one of them, for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing. You, and only you, will have stars that laugh.

And when you are comforted, you will be happy to have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And from time to time you will open your window, just for the fun of it....And your friends will be astonished to see you laughing at the sky. And so you will say to them....Yes, the stars always make me laugh."

The Little Prince. (of course!)

I love The Land of Green Ginger! Still have my original copy from childhood and have frequently re-read it.

If you had to marry a wicked prince, would you have chosen Tintac Ping Foo - or Rubdub Ben Thud?

(Although my favourite name is probably Sulkpot Ben NagNag - a frequently used expression for any DC who was behaving badly at the time)

I've read The Land of Green Ginger too. It's one of my faves from my youth. It was brilliant reading it to dd when she was about 6 and we used Boomalakka Wee as an exclamation when we didn't know what to say for years after! She's reread it countless times since. Another is The Phantom Tollbooth.

I can still remember the whole of the spell that releases the magician -

Pi R squared sideways,
The cube root of zero.
Manganese potash and mushrooms on toast.
Leaf of the lily, and I, Abu Ali,
Turn you back into the man you miss most.

I bought a new edition of the book and was very disappointed to find the spell had been edited out - but I have managed to find an older edition that hasn't been buggered around with. They are out there - don't despair, JulesJules.

Stdg, I never met anyone else who had even read the Land Of Green Ginger, let alone quoted from it! It is one of my favourite funny books. An off to reread it.

And the rest of the world thinks we are all total nutters, but they can go and talk to their backsides for all I care. Because they are all just fruit loops who don't know what it is to believe in something which is hard to see, or to keep looking for something which is totally hard to find.

Pobby and Dingan

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn?t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

Stephen King, can't remember which book.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Tribpot, yes now I remember, Walter is a dog, what a good memory you have!

'But this road doesn't go anywhere' I told him. 'That doesn't matter'. 'What does?' I asked after a little while. 'Just that we're on it dude'.
Less Than Zero - Brett Easton Ellis.

From one of the Horrid Henry collections, when the lovely Henry is looking to enlarge his part in the school nativity play:

"Is there any room at the inn?"
"Yes," replied Henry, "Come in, we've got satellite TV and everything."

"Grief is the price we pay for love"
[A quote from the memorial service for British victims of 9/11), more than a line from a book, but used by Sir Christopher Myers (British Ambassador to the USA at the time) and quoted in his autobiography and therefore counts by my reckoning. ]

"It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal"

[Mr Emerson speaking to Miss Honeychurch just before she realises who she loves at the end of Room with a View.]

"No, I don't think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how." [swoon]
[Rhett to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. ]

And to lower the tone completely, just because it sticks in my head at this time every year:
"First of May, First of May,
Outdoor fucking starts today.
But as usual it do rain
So we fucks off indoors again".
[Rupert to Cameron in Rivals, Jilly Cooper]

From memory so not sure it's completely accurate, but:
"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I?ve been doing all my life after people who interest me.." (On the Road)

It's such a visual quotation; and reminds me faintly of DH.

Not very 'high brow' but I love both the opening and closing lines of The Outsiders..

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home

Stay Gold Ponyboy

Wer am meisten liebt ist der Unterlegene und muß leiden.

Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger. "Whichever loves the more is the inferior and has to suffer".