Favourite lines or passages from books?

[giamtGiffaffe]

Please :)

‘The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself’.

John Fowles, The Magus

"Isn't it pretty to think so", which is Jake's reply to Brett's assertion that they could have had a good life together at the end of Hemingway's "Fiesta".

I've always liked Cathy Earnshaw's "eternal rocks beneath" in Wuthering Heights too.

If poems are included, pretty much most of The Waste Land but if I'm in a busy place I always think of, "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many".

And not forgetting Douglas Adams', "So long and thanks for all the fish".

"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.

Ha! It makes me laugh because you can immediately imagine CS Lewis as well. He really did let himself go with all his prejudices in that one - including the harm to a boy’s character from coeducation and an absence of beatings.

"You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear."
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

"Well, you have a choice. You can go to New York with Mrs Van [???] or come home to Manderley with me."
"What do you mean, as some sort of secretary or something?"
"No, you little fool! I'm asking you to marry me."
(From Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.)

"Waiting is rust for the soul." From a fantastic book set in Barcelona called The Shadow of the Wind. I think of it every time I'm out with DH and he is dithering, looking at houses/trees/birds/dogs or whatever, won't get a move on and I have to wait for him. Lots of other good lines in that book.

You have reminded me of the last lines in The Hollow Men - This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. Always comes to me when I'm feeling a bit low

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way"

A Tale of Two Cities

“Poor Linda,” she said, with feeling, “poor little thing.
But Fanny, don’t you think perhaps it’s just as well? The
lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun
when one begins to grow older.”

I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings by protest-
ing that Linda was not that sort of woman.

“But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,”
I said. “He was the great love of her life, you know.”

“Oh, dulling,” said my mother, sadly. “One always
thinks that. Every, every time.”

Pursuit of Love last lines.

"I can't be having with this." - Granny Weatherwax, not sure which of the Discworld books but I always hear this when I get exasperated.

"Everyone's naked under their clothes, Esme."
"I ain't. I got three vests on!"

'... but that's what true faith would mean, y'see? Sacrificin' your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin' the truth of it, workin' for it, breathin' the soul of it. That's religion. Anything else is just ... is just bein' nice. And a way of keepin' in touch with the neighbours.'

• this is pretty much my view on religion.

The last lines of Ozymandias by Shelley, about the impermanence of man’s efforts:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.“

'there will always be monsters. And men must always fight against them.' - The Ship That Flew

'Ruddy stargazers, not interested in anything closer 'n the Moon!'

JK Rowling

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Wordsworth. Had to quote that to John Lewis when they asked me to review washing up liquid purchase. And thank you to my NI English teacher for ramming that sentiment home, because I have always remembered it.

“Her arm curved to the floor, her fingers inches from Ron's. Harry wondered whether they had fallen asleep holding hands. The idea made him feel strangely lonely.”

from HP and The Deathly Hallows

Jane Eyre:

Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little that I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you."

John Donne, in a poem about separation where he compares himself and his love to the two arms of a compass:

If they be so two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other dar doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.

One that always stuck in my head was
‘Keep passing the open windows’
From the John Irving novel, The Hotel New Hampshire

I’ve stopped reading fiction as “Lincoln In The Bardo” is too perfect and I’ll no longer be able to read fluffy fiction.

I can currently only read no fiction

@sunflower1988 me too!

Bunyan,Pilgrim's Progress - "The man with a muckrake in his hand can seldom look any place but down"

Harriet Wilson - Memoirs ,1825, - "I shall not say how and why I became,at the age of fifteen,the mistress of the Earl of Craven"......beat that for an opening line.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Middlemarch

Short cuts make long delays.

LOTR The Fellowship of the Ring
JRR Tolkien

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451

"I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

"I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend."

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

Both give me chills.

”Frodo was now safe in the last homely house east of the sea.
That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, 'a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. “

I can smell the woodsmoke now. Makes me feel so relaxed and grounded.