What is your favourite line of literature?

The entire text of 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' by TS Eliot but this line : "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" is particularly evocative.

And of course from Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles
"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one.

Welsh I salute your choices!

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Great epitaph mrsdavidbowie.

I'd like Dr Seuss:

Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!

Blake:
‘Such, such were the joys When we all, girls and boys, In our youth-time were seen On the echoing green.’

From Ballet Shoes:

Doctor Jakes came over to the shelves.
‘Literature is my subject.’
‘Is it? Is that what you’re a Doctor of?’
‘More or less. But apart from that, books are very ornamental things to have about.’
Pauline looked at the shelves. These books certainly were grand-looking – all smooth shiny covers, and lots of gold on them.
‘Ours aren’t very,’ she said frankly. ‘Yours are more all one size. We have things next to each other like Peter RabbitandJust So Stories, and they don’t match very well.’
‘No, but very good reading.’
Pauline came to the fire. It was a lovely fire; she stood looking at the logs on it.
‘Do you thinkPeter Rabbitgood reading? I would have thought a person who taught literature was too grand for it.’
‘Not a bit – very old friend of mine.’

Also love this bit of Hemingway from For Whom the Bell Tolls:

"Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond."

Genius man. Not a word wasted.

"Let him come out of this a trifle high. But what kind of high? High, I think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw the last shot he made. Yes. Oui."

Salinger. Joy.

Novels: "The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letterbox and there was suddenly a six o' clock feeling in the house." Muriel Spark. Perfection.

Poetry - I can never decide, but one of:

"...but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply..." (Edna St Vincent Millay)

Or Matthew Arnold - I always loved "the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea" mentioned above, but also:

"But the majestic river floated on
out of the mist and hum of that low land
into the frosty starlight" (Sohrab and Rustum)

The last lines of S & R are beautiful too.

And:

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
where ignorant armies clash by night."
(Dover Beach)

Looking at these I think I might be a bit obsessed by water....

Reader, I married him.

I just read The Poisonwood Bible and although I don't think it was a great line in literature, there's one sentence in that book that really summed up the despair and pointlessness the mother was feeling. She says "I knew Rome was burning, but I had enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could."
It really stopped me in my tracks. I love it when lines in books do that.

If we are doing poetry...

Who will go drive with Fergus now
And pierce the deep woods woven glade
And dance upon the level shore?

Whenever I am on a beach I dance upon the level shore with Yeats & his mystic king.

"We live as we dream - alone."

From The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

"Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow
The small raine down can raine.
Christ, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!"
Anon. Sixteenth century.

"...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

AnneElliott I think the friend quote is about Baloo, from The Jungle Book. But the end of A Tale Of Two Cities makes me cry too.

THAN not that.

I love this line.

Its better to be unhappy and know the worst that be happy in a fools paradise.

Dostoyesvky.

I love Dostoyevksy - Crime and Pushiment is possibly my favourite book.

LeBearPolar I'm finally reading The Book Thief too! Just started part two. Really enjoying it :)

Ooh, Hopkins.

Oh the mind, mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed
Hold them cheap may that ne'er hung there

I am just reading The Book Thief for the first time and it is full of gorgeous lines:

“The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both."

and this one is so frighteningly true:

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.”

This line from The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time most loved:

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking."

and this one from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead has long been a favourite:

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

Practically everything in Gatsby but this one is haunting:

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

I wish my favourite line was more "classic", but I didn't even have to think about it . "what can the harvest hope for but the care of the Reaper Man" (Terry Pratchett)
Goodness knows why,I find it comforting...
KurriKurri, I love that Hopkins poem.

"Her voice is full of money." The Great Gatsby.