Fave one liner from a book?

'Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.'

• Ann Michaels, Fugitive Pieces.

'I am cold, sir.'
'Cold? Yes, and standing in a puddle. Go then, Jane,' yet still he would not release my hand.

• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte. (From memory - may not be accurate.) Not a one-liner but, oh, the sexual tension in that scene!

Absolutely loving this thread.

'...I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny or reward filial disobedience.'

The end of Northanger Abbey. Not my favourite Austen overall, but that line is a belly laugh and a dagger to the forehead at the same moment and I re-read NA more often than any other just to get that payoff.

“I'm me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.”
? Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

?His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.? Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

?To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.?

Not a novel, but a line from Lady Bracknell in the play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Also, "a handbag?" said in the manner of Edith Evans in the 1952 film. One of my dad's favourites when I was running round the house getting ready for a night out and looking for said accessory!

Gilbert Blythe: It'll be three years before I finish medical school. Even then there won't be any diamond sunbursts or marble halls.
Anne Shirley: I don't want diamond sunbursts, or marble halls. I just want you.

Anne of Avonlea

Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19?28

Medvedenko: Why do you always wear black?
Masha: I am in mourning for my life.

Chekhov's The Seagull

"Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on
earth."

Villette - Charlotte Bronte

Also "Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love." Arundal Tomb by Philip Larkin

Now, that,? said Sophy, ?I am very glad to know, because if ever I should desire to please you I shall know just how to set about it. I daresay I shan?t, but one likes to be prepared for any event, however unlikely"

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer.

And another vote for Sir T P and PG Wodehouse... TP can throw in the most beautiful of lines in the oddest of circumstances/settings and PGW is sniggeringly funny almost constantly!

"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."

The last line of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Makes me howl, every time (including this one).

Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta.

Perfect synopsis of moral dilemma, internal strife, human (hetero)sexuality, humility and arrogance, the differences between men and women, ecstasy and humiliation.... I often hear myself saying these words out loud when I'm thinking about stuff, people must think I'm crazy.

Oh my Goodness, Mergues - I never realised. Sorry!

And I prefer Marlowes' one . . .

guggenheim thank you for your Scrooge quotes. I was watching Dr Who the other week and someone said to the monster "What do you want with me?" and it replied "Much!" - I said to DH, now that's taken from something, and I couldn't remember what; now I remember it was Marley's Ghhost. Thank you.

"Cotton was the fabric of virtue, I wore silk"

One amongst many from The Woman in White

"When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools" - Mr S, King Lear.

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

The Handmaid's tale... Not quite one line though, but I love it.

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". The Go Between, LP Hartley.

Not a book but tis Hardy's " blithely breakfasting[...] ...down their carved names the rain drop ploughs"

"All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Anna Karenina.

?I?m not saying she was very silly, but one of us was very silly and it wasn?t me.? (Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters)

"Some thoughts have glue on them", from Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, by Peter Hoeg.

I LOVE that line!

Only halfway through reading this thread but absolutely to any of those mentioned by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett (two of my favourite authors). I crashed in halfway through to offer this, from a play...

ALGERNON: Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
LANE: I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

"Ordinary life goes on - that has saved many a man's reason."

Graham Greene 'The Quiet American'