What is your favourite line of literature?

"I've danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile, and many a long day; and it is hard to begrudge me this one visit." Far From The Madding Crowd.

Oh, how I longed to have the courage to call a daughter Bathsheba. And "skittish" is such a delightful word.

“Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.”

? Thomas Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge

Sums up so much of life

"It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live"

Chills.

This totally hit a nerve with me and I feel has genuinely improved my outlook on life.

Dorothy L sayers has some good lines, quite long so can't remember exactly off the top of my head (plus I've been to the pub) but one, from Strong Poison, set in the early 1930s when people were still wearing corsets, goes something like:

'... said Mrs Featherstone, a woman who's violently compressed figure suggested she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last.'

Excellent.

and, of course, that best opening line ever, from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith:

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.'

My favourite is one that makes me laugh, from LOTR:

"When she arrived later in the day, she took the point at once. But she also took the spoons."

"The truth is a lemon meringue" Mr. Gum. Marvellous.

It is a truth universally acknowledge that a single man of large fortune it's be in want of a wife. P&P Austen

The ending to the Tale of two cities. I think it goes "there is no greater love, than of laying down ones life for a friend".

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about - From Love in the time of cholera

"Hey,Boo," I said...... from To Kill A Mockingbird.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be -- and whenever I look up there will be you." from Far From the Madding Crowd.

I love that too, but having initially heard it as a romantic quote in the Vicar of Dibley, I pmsl at Bathsheba's reaction when I read the book.

"No I don't want to marry you...Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband."

I have always loved "Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly."

...from Jane Eyre

Also "I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at the worst time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine...”
? Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

"There's a dog loose in the wood" from Watership Down. It's one of Fiver's premonitions and is so ominous and foreboding...I love it.

Also 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep' by Robert Frost.

I LIKE WOODS, CLEARLY.

'You may my glories and my states depose,
But not my griefs; still I am king of those' (from Richard II)

“I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”
(Sylvia Plath)

''I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.''

(Hopkins)

"The black snake of wounded vanity had been gnawing at his heart all night" Dostoevsky Crime & Punishment

"We toasted Bacchus and the Muses, and drank a wine rich as unicorn's blood" Mitchell Cloud Atlas
(Drinking red wine been an altered experience ever since this read!)

That reminds me of Shakespeare in Love Takver where everyone who comes to audition for Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter does that speech and poor Shakespeare is

My favourite has to be Bonario in Volpone jumping out and shouting

"Forbear, foul ravisher, libidinous swine! Free the forced lady, or thou diest, imposter!"

I've always wanted to have the chance to act it

For a more serious line, it has to be

"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"

though there are endless lines of Dr Faustus that I love

"I measured love but the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all." Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

"Non omnis moriar" (I shall never completely die) The Odes of Horace Book III.30

"We can't stop here. This is bat country."
Hunter S Thompson

So brilliantly gonzo.

“And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...”
Dylan Thomas.

Swoooooooooooon.

"There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. The three extra days were for leap years."
Solzhenitsyn

"...Do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!... I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
Emily Bronte

Oh, I really don't like the Kate B Emma because Mark Strong is so cross all the way through (and also because Kate B has a moustache in it which I just can't get past, even though I know it is shallow and wrong).

I love the way Charlotte Lucas is portrayed in the 2005 adaptation of P&P - the way it makes sense of her decision to marry Mr Collins is brilliant. That actress is always good. I also really like the way they showed the shock when Darcy touches Lizzie's hand without a glove. Brrrrrr.

"He's come to take my soul" she thought, "but I don't remember saying he could have it"

John Le Carre, the Little Drummer Girl

"If he had not wanted me to love him, he should not have looked at me" Graham Green

"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain." Mayor of Casterbridge

Oh I just thought of one, I apologise in advance if I don't get it quite right at this time of night.

"You should be kissed often, and by somebody who knows how." Rhett Butler

Struggling to remember if that line was in the book or not, but I am sure it was.

The Kate B one is absolutely fantastic. I really like Mr. Knightly, he was very well cast against her Emma.

Ugh I detest the Paltrow one.

The idea of Lady C doing anything pleasant is far more far-fetched than Darcy saying, "You have bewitched me" I think.

I adore the Harriet in the Kate B Emma.

I do like that one. Much better than the Paltrow one.

The 1940 P&P they change the ending so it turns out Lady Catherine is in cahoots with Darcy and demands that Elizabeth not marry him in order to get her to change her mind and to see if she really loves him. A jolly old wheeze is had by all.