Fave one liner from a book?

I think it's a dog! (Walter)

*character called Walter, pressed without proof reading!

From a Jilly Cooper novel, but not sure I've got it exactly right, it obviously has a charachter in it .
"Blood is thicker than wa(l)ter, actually nothing is thicker than Walter"

I'm sure this one has been mentioned, I will go back and read the whole thread, but this is my absolute favourite:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

Kerouac - On the road

Ah, what a trifle is a heart
If once into love's hands it come.

The inimitable John Donne, The Broken Heart.

Also - on a brighter note! - Charles Stross but I can't remember which book

"Gene Police! You! out of the pool."

I think I'll buy the flowers myself.

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woofl

Love all of these; especially the ones in books I haven't read. I must try Forester again.

I'll add this one for those who love the bishop in Les Miserables:

'He did not seek to assume the mantel of Elijah, to shed light on the future upon the mysty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the ystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.'

And as a description of friends from the ABC society:

'Enjolras was the leader, Combeferre the guide and Courfeyrac the centre. The others shed more light, but he shed more warmth.'

And this from Marius' diary which I first read as an impressionable teen and it stuck with me:

'There are thoughts which are prayers. There are some moment when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.'

Not a one-liner, but since people have disregarded that almost from the start of the thread, here's a small paragraph that I like:

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts? deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

Stephen King, The Dark Tower

His sense of her as someone of not quite serious adult size was integral to the way her loved her.

On Green Dolphin Street, Sebastian Faulks.

Love this thread! Too many to choose from, but two that spring instantly to mind :

"Reality. So banal, so foolish, so incoherent - such a baffling and disappointing nuisance. Not like being in that study in Connecticut, where the only thing thats real is you" Operation Shylock by Phillip Roth

"I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness." The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Just done my song lyrics

Link it, mrsC!

Not wishing to derail, but I started a thread about lyrics yesterday...so far, no posts on it though

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths
fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Last bit in Wuthering Heights

I should say Austen has Fanny ejaculating at one point.

Not quite finished the thread but I love this from Flaubert

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity

Following on from the ejaculation in Emma's ear:

"The girls had reached the age when they began to long for balls."

I'm sure that's in Pride & Prejudice somewhere.

"My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression"

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep

I love 'God of small things too', Beehatch. I think she writes beautifully.

Also loads from Life of Pi, but particularly,

'This Son, on the other hand, who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don't get it and opponents who don't respect Him - what kind of a god is that? It's a god on too human a scale, that's what.'

and

'If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?'

I love Arundhati Roy's 'God of small things', so many distinctive lines, but here's a couple:

"They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."

"Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age."

"the doctor looked even crosser when Angel just swept Bibi up in his arms and walked out of the hospital, banging on the door of the Impotency Support Group as he went and yelling 'keep eet up, two, three, four'." Polo, Jilly Cooper

"What a pity Bilbo did not stab that foul creature when he had the chance!"
"Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy, not to strike without need. Many that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too hasty to deal out death to the living. Even the Wise cannot see all ends." Gandalf, LOTR.

"It wasn't a boy that won the Avery scholarship. It was a girl. My girl, that I'm proud of." Matthew in Anne of Green Gables

'Diana said nothing: she had a considerable experience and she knew that if men were to be at all tolerable they must be fed.'

Patrick O'Brian - The Fortune of War