Favourite lines or passages from books?

[giamtGiffaffe]

Please :)

I always really like "Nod away at him Mr Pip; that's what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!". From Great Expectations.

As someone adopted, even though it's fiction, this just made me cry and brings me comfort that my birth mum would feel the same way. Thank you

Another PG Wodehouse, re one of Bertie's erstwhile fiancees: "muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a troop of cavalry storming over a tin bridge."

wellhelloitsme

How lovely of you to say so and I'm so glad it comforted you
It's a lovely book, very light in many ways but I always want to be a better person after reading it (I wish there was a less mawkish way of saying that ).

'There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience....and there are never really endings, happy or otherwise'

'Cocks like three week old rotting carrots'

Many of Bill Bryson's lines made me laugh aloud and have stuck in my brain forever:

'I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.'

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
and don’t have any kids yourself

— Philip Larkin

Good things come to an end. Bad things have to be stopped.

It's not as classy as previous quotes, it's from a Warhammer novel called Anno Dracula, but I love it and it's true.

Captain Wentworth's hastily scribbled note to Anne Elliot in Persuasion

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. First line of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' of course!

"Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day ; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead. Goodbye; I must now say goodbye to all of it."
Lincoln In The Bardo - George Saunders. So many beautiful lines in that book.

'If I loved you less I might be able to talk about it more' (Mr Knightley to Emma in Jane Austen's 'Emma')

Oh God, this one too!

*wails

Primo Levi, If This Is A Man.

It's the part when he describes how the Nazis are coming to the mountains for the Italian Jews who have fled there. Many of them are mothers, children and students. They dreamt of starting a resistance group but realised it would he futile because they comprised of, well, mothers, young children and inexperienced, naive students.

He described how, the night before, when they didn't know exactly what was going to happen to them but they knew it wasn't good.

He described how the mothers made packed lunches for the children, washed their clothes and hung them out to dry, bathed them, sang to them and hugged them.

I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the book to hand but the line is something like, "But if you knew your children would die tomorrow, would you still not feed them today?"

The thought of those mothers caring for their children, not aware of the absolute horror that lay ahead but knowing there was something.

It brings a tear to my eye even just thinking about it.

Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” - A Song of Ice and Fire.

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

This made me smile. My daughter has taken How to Kill Your Family away on holiday this week 😁

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

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.

I remember reading that for the first time as an A Level student and absolutely loved it.

The preceding lines are about how many millions of lives were lost in various wars, etc.

“And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.
All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.
And this one is Teddy’s”.

A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson. I’ve recently re-read it again and I cried just as much this time as I did the first time I read it.

‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen’.

DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Dr. Ian Malcolm, "God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs. God creates Man, man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs"
Dr. Ellie Sattler, "Dinosaurs eat man..... Woman inherits the earth”.

Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

Hence my username

Will definitely be looking to read some of the book mentioned here.

Desiderata by Max Erhman

But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fear and loneliness

This poem is my literal guide to life, my CBT therapist introduced me to it and it such a good tool for me especially when those negative thoughts creep back in

Whoever controls the present controls the past. And whoever controls the past controls the future (George Orwell, 1984).

Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying.That was our history. ( John Harris, Covenant with Death (a book about a fictional Pals battalion in the First World war that suffered huge casualties on the first day of the Somme. One of the most powerful books I have ever read))

And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind of the sea (Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Better drowned than duffers if not duffers won't drown (Swallows and Amazons)

Bookmarking this thread! Some fellow romantics out there i see :-)