Favourite lines or passages from books?

[giamtGiffaffe]

Please :)

LadyOfTheCanyon : Yes.
Every. Single.Time.

'She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season ' PG Wodehouse.
My weight has been commented on many times but no one has ever called me fat so elegantly!

Also 'There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a
distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and
respect...'
It's the awful Sir Walter in Austen's 'Persuasion' reading the Baronetage, but I always think it's a lovely description of the joys of a book you love.

From the very wise and philosophical Jack Reacher:

'Never forgive, never forget'

'Hope for the best, prepare for the worst'

‘What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.’ - Wolf Hall

It’s not my favourite quote ever, but it’s been going around and around in my head lately, as we seem to be there again.

You is kind. You is smart. You is important.

Kathryn Stockett (The Help)

'Daddy, oh my Daddy', from the Railway Children

PG Wodehouse is wonderful.

"He looked as though he'd been poured into his suit and forgotten to say when"

I love this.

I am banned from reading Wodehouse in company because I just spend the whole time reading bits of it aloud.

OhTheLeetleHandsAndFeetle

My family wouldn't sit next to me in an airport lounge once when I was reading PG Wodehouse because I couldn't stop crying with laughter.

Voyage of the Dawntreader:

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." and the rest of the passage which goes on to say his parents are vegetarians, non-smokers, teetotallers, pacifists, and wear an unspecified special kind of underclothes.

Makes me laugh because you can immediately imagine them.

But also in Storm Ahead by Monica Edwards there's a whole section but there's a few bits that stand out in that section.

One where Meryon is watching the lifeboat with binoculars and suddenly stops and says:
"She's gone over-I saw her-right over."
And later when they're trying to recue the crew of the lifeboat and Tamzin offers to Jim the Ferryman to take his place so he can go and see if his son, who was on the lifeboat, has been saved, his reply:
"Couldn't make no difference, gal. We got a job on. T'ent only our young Jimmy, see?"
Then an hour later, when Jimmy is reported as brought in, Meryon takes Jim's place so he can go to his son.
"No one turned to watch the old man plodding over the hard sand to where other men fought for his son's life, kneeling in the storm-wrack under the grass blown dunes."

Cause of death: this broken world
from The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“So, they went off together. 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.”

AA Milne.

It’s too much for me.

‘The new curate seemed quite a nice young man, but what a pity it was that his combinations showed, tucked carelessly into his socks, when he sat down.’
First line of Some Tame Gazelle, by Barbara Pym.

Also the first line of ‘I Capture The Castle’, by Dodie Smith, which goes something like, ‘I write this sitting on the draining board, which I’ve padded with the dog’s blanket, with my feet in the sink, because it’s the only place where there’s any light left.’

P.G. Wodehouse has made social pariahs of us all.

from The Pursuit of Love about an old family photograph.

‘There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment - click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.’

There’s a poem by Margaret Atwood called ‘Aflame’ which begins

’ The world’s burning up. It always did.’

and finishes

’We had to know. We had to know how such tales really end: and why. They end in flames because that’s what we want: we want them to.’

It’s been going round my head this summer as humankind’s attitude to climate change proves that we won’t really be content until we’ve destroyed ourselves.

Oh, yes, P G Wodehouse - ‘…aunt bellowing to aunt like mastodons across the primeval swamp’, and ‘If not exactly disgruntled, he was very far from being gruntled.’

If my last words are not, I love you, ye'll ken it was because I dinna have time. - Jamie to Claire.

The Fiery Cross ( Outlander Series Diana Gabledon book 6. )

Absence implies presence; absence is not non existence - A Passage to India

That perceptible hush which precedes a crisis - Portrait of a Lady

From the end of The Incredible Journey, after the elderly bull terrier has been assumed not to have survived:

’He broke into a run, faster and faster, until the years fell away, and he hurled himself towards Peter. And as he had never run before, as though he would outdistance time, Peter was running towards his dog.’

I love that line about Eustace Clarence Scrubb too. Narnia also throws up, in a description of Cair Paravel: "and oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you heard it? Do you remember?"

In Guards! Guards!" by Terry Pratchett
after the early paragraph in which Vimes is musing
the city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. Thass what it was...Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy...and just when you thought you'd got her, it, out of your, your, whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off bal... Only thing you were sure of, you couldn't let her go...

Then at the end we get his sudden realisation that Lady Sybil is trying to catch him, and his thoughts are
...and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.

There's a quote in Middlemarch, I can't remember it exactly, but it is Will, talking about Dorothea.

"Explain my preference for her? I should as soon have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists but her."

I wish you a long and happy life.

Last line of The Lovely Bones. I find those words haunting

Love that too! The culmination of such a long will she? Won't she?

The Amber Spyglass, bit of a long one but gets me everytime-

I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about for ever, all my atoms, till I find you again...
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight.