Fave one liner from a book?

And another, from a favourite book:
?A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.?
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

?A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.?
Joanne Harris, Blackberry Wine

Don't think anyone has quoted this, sorry it's so long; "I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." Beautiful, but loathed the book.Wuthering Heights.
also: " Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother on his approaching marriage were all that was affectionate and insincere." P & P

Oh yes, PG Wodehouse: "Death, where is thy jolly old sting?"
(sorry can't remember which book)

I'm afraid that Mary Webb quote makes me understand exactly why Stella Gibbons felt the need to put the boot in. Sorry.

X-post!

doctrine I've just looked it up, it's from Lords and Ladies. I have used it to explain the Big Bang to my dd!

Cerubina - you are one of the few that seem to share my love of Precious Bane. A wonderful book!

Archfiend - I think the Pratchett quote is from Lords & Ladies.

(Sad git alert - I have all his discword novels in a huge span across my bookshelf)

A recent favourite, "Did they ever decide whether it was ethical for those turned into pillars of salt to be ground up for use as winter road grit?"
(The Woman Who Died a Lot - Jasper Fforde)

I like that Terry P one, archfiend.

Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light
Dylan Thomas
Not all those who wander are lost
JRR Tolkien

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

Tom Robbins - Still Life With Woodpecker

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
Tom Robbins- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded

Terry Pratchett (can't remember which one!)

Ah, Doctrine of Snatch - I thought you must be a LPW fan.

Yes to your suggestion. And also to 'I have come home'

The ending of The Grapes of Wrath blows my head off every time I read it - too long to quote and don't want to spoil it for those who may not know it. Quite simply, my life is richer and better for having read that truly great novel.

Bleak House: "Jo lives - that is to say Jo has not yet died - in a ruinous place known to the likes of him by the name of Tom-All-Alone's"

that sentence, and the rest of the paragraph which ensues, crystallises why Dickens is such a Great Master, IMO.

Cormack McCarthy in The Road: "Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made"

Two short extracts from me - one A Town Like Alice:
"I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.".

And from Precious Bane by Mary Webb:
"'There, there, my dear! None shall touch you now!' All the strong life of the man was gathered in his eyes, and blazing full on me. So he'd heard! Folk do sometimes when they seem nigh dead. He'd heard and remembered the words I'd said when his head was on my bosom and my heart was all rent with love. What could I say? Naught. Where could I hide my burning face, that his eyes did so dwell on? Nowhere at all.

'Hi, Weaver!' they called. 'Waggon be come and we be hindered for ye!'

'I never knew a mother's love, nor yet a sister's, nor yet a sweetheart's.' He said it ever so softly, but despert earnest, so that the words burnt in. 'But if I had, I should have forgot 'em all three when you said those words to me, Prue Sarn!'"

A beautiful but dangerous sentiment from Wuthering Heights:

"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary."

It is not often someone comes along that's a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

• Charlotte's Web

But something like that couldn't happen again. Not in this day and age.

• The Boy In The Striped pyjamas. :(

'Tomorrow is another day.'
I think this is from the end of 'Gone With The Wind'

There's a great line in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White about "the snot of men's ecstasty". Unfortunately, I don't have the book to hand, but it's stuck in my head.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between.

&

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero in The Tempest

I will go back and read all that have come before, but for the moment, here is mine (as the whole paragraph is great I have put it all in and selected the one line I would have, if pushed):

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of war nor of wizardry, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

"I'll rise but I won't shine"

From The Glass Menagerie

My favourite - although I can't remember which book it is from. It was quoted to me a long time ago in a far away land and I've always remembered it.

?One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name?

Probably mentioned by others, but....

"Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your fathers passin'"

and

"Pass the damn ham, please"

Both in To Kill A Mockingbird.

"When you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done"

Oh, The Places You'll Go! by Dr Seuss

"He wants to have his cake, eat it and make trifle out of it too". Not sure where I read that, but I think it might be in a Jilly Cooper (sorry to lower the tone!)