What is your favourite line of literature?

This is the end of a Tale of Two Cities & it is a great line

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends is from the bible

I do like the opening line of the Go Between:

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

Why do you walk through the field in gloves, O fat white woman who nobody loves - Seen from a Train, not sure who by,but always gives me the shivers.

*Quite.

Will look up the quote shortly. Am not in good form today

Anything (ok, not wuite anything) from Wuthering Heights. Also, the last line from Villette or the Professor.

He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he'd left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea's black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

Cormac McCarthy 'The Road'

Remember this, as an awkward teenager, being the first piece of prose I found utterly poignant :

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. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
Wuthering heights

'"I see". He did not at all see.'

That line from Sons and Lovers tickled me the other eve as I was at that point finding the whole book quite confusing.

Ah Chopsypie those Philip Pullman quotes (especially the Lee Scoresby/Hester death scene) have me tearing up - I'll be sobbing my way round Tesco!

All of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot. Heartbreaking yet slightly ridiculous, amazingly beautiful and unusual imagery. One of the few poems I re-read on a regular basis.

And Villette for a bit of soppiness: "Warm, jealous, and haughty, I knew not till now that my nature had such a mood: he gathered me near his heart. I was full of faults; he took them and me all home. For the moment of utmost mutiny, he reserved the one deep spell of peace. These words caressed my ear:— 'Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.'"

Just found this lovely thread.
I've just read the 'his dark materials' trilogy, so these are very fresh in my mind

She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him -- didn't speak to him in her head, didn't relive every moment they'd been together, didn't long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.

And

Then she was pressing her little
proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

Love that line from The Night Circus

Also several lines from Hitchikers I love including "I could never get the hang of Thursdays"

And these from Signature of all Things

"Take me someplace where we can be silent together"

"There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy."

"I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living."

Agree re. the Rebecca and Gatsby ones - all wonderful. Love the Gatsby line that Zelda is supposed to have actually said when Scotty was born "I hope she's a fool, a beautiful little fool."

There are too many to name in The Little Prince as well.

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels is a beautifully written book that has some amazing quotes for me:

"There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.

And from The Night Circus

I would have written you, myself, if I could put down in words everything I want to say to you. A sea of ink would not be enough.' 'But you built me dreams instead.

And so as winter changes into spring, which changes into summer, there are things which go on forever unchanging. Such as the way a certain boy cares for a certain bear. And we will know, for as long as we care to remember that somewhere in that enchanted place on top the forest, a boy and his bear will always be playing.

I know it's only a children's book but I absolutely HOWLED when I read that to my son.

FFS, did I kill the thread by putting something pervy on again?

"Sex with you was like being eaten like a wolf", from AppleTree Yard. I want me some of that sex. It speaks to me of being passionately devoured. Engulfed.

Also, wouldn't say its a favourite, but it often pops into my head: "so foul and fair a day I have not seen", when Macbeth comes off the battlefield in victory tempered with having witnessed savagery and blood shed.

Ah no. Don't let me kill this thread too!!!!

Aoife24 I agree with you. That paragraph from 'The Dead' has stayed with me. So evocative.

Austin Clarke ( another Irish poet)
' and oh, she was the Sunday in every week' from 'The Planter's Daughter' a wonderful poem.

Oscar Wilde 'We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars'
W.B.Yeats 'Tread softly because you tread on my dreams'
Brendan Kennelly ( Irish Poet) '.....and she is rich if she receives the merest hint of what she gave' - I dedicate that to my mum though she drives me insane at times
Scarlet O' Hara 'Tomorrow is another day'

Oscar Wilde in An Ideal Husband: I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

PG Wodehouse (among many, I always read PG Wodehouse to cheer myself up): Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe.

Not a line I'm afraid but a paragrpah from The Dead:

'Yes, the news­pa­pers were right: snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, fur­ther west­wards, softly falling into the dark muti­nous Shan­non waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely church­yard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and head­stones, on the spears of the lit­tle gate, on the bar­ren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the uni­verse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the liv­ing and the dead'.

"I never could get the hang of Thursdays." (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)

I do also love "the great, grey, green, greasy Limpopo River", and I went through a phase of muttering "O my best beloved" to myself (I am not sure why.) It wasn't always muttering that others couldn't hear, though, and not everyone has read Kipling.

And if we are talking about literature, I am going to be utterly pretentious and say Catullus's "odi et amo."