Favourite lines or passages from books?

[giamtGiffaffe]

Please :)

'Some also have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over; but the way is the way, and there is an end.'

'The Pilgrim's Progress', John Bunyan.

From Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, not remembered accurately but...
"All over the house, hearts were breaking like pipes in winter"

The Pullman ones make me sob. I will add this one as it always strikes a nerve

She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most

And this one from the wonderful 'The Gift of Rain'

Who can look back and truly say all his memories are happy ones? To have memories, happy or sorrowful, is a blessing, for it shows we have lived our lives without reservation."

I love a book called The House at Riverton by Kate Morton. It relates to a woman, Grace, who worked at said house for a wealthy family as a young woman between the wars when a tragedy occurred. The context of this passage is a 98 year old Grace, who is seeing our her days in a care home, being taken back to the house:

A strange thing began to happen, though. Memories, long consigned to the dark reaches of my mind, began to sneak through cracks. Images were tossed up high and dry, picture-perfect, as if a lifetime hadn't passed between. And, after the first tentative drops, the deluge. Whole conversations, word for word, nuance for nuance; scenes played out as though on film. I have surprised myself. While moths have torn holes in my recent memories, I find the distant past is sharp and clear

i love the idea of being in the last days of your life and being mentally transported back to your youth in that way.

From Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy. Both quotes are about Eustacua Vye

"A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years."

"To be loved to madness - such was her great desire....."

From Prozac nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel

"And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lose my mind, that is all I can say too"

It's the "gradually and then suddenly" line that resonates

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and [Edgar’s] is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Wuthering Heights

A whole Gothic world had come to grief... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...

A Handful of Dust.

“It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.”
Les Miserables.

Yes, this. So heartfelt and beautiful.

“For you a thousand times over” from kite runner

Cry every time

There's a book where a child survives when they should really have died and they are described as having been "lifted through a gap in the way of things".

I think that is so beautifully put.

"Arrange your face" from Wolf Hall. Useful advice for life I think.

My favourite and most hated line are the same

”The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”

The Dark Tower, Stephen King. #IfYouKnowYouKnow

Loved reading some these.
but to take it down a peg or two.

“When God was creating the earth and allotting every thing it’s place in it. Eventually a voice was heard. ‘Oh for God’s sake , if no one else will do it , I will ! ‘ said the Dung beetle!

Ben Elton, in Gridlock I think

"All of the rest of the pages were blank."

• the last line of Charlotte Sometimes, in which a girl from the 50s and one from World War 1 timeswap with each other by sleeping in the same bed at boarding school. They find a way to communicate with each other via an exercise book they leave inside the bed post which unscrews.

Charlotte finally gets back to the future and stops switching places with Clare from WW1. She eventually finds out that the last time they swapped places, Clare swapped into the school infirmary in the flu pandemic, caught flu, and died. Charlotte finds the ancient exercise book still in the bedpost, but Clare never got the chance to write any further messages.

Broke my heart as a 12 year old.

From Rilla of Ingleside (L.M Montgomery..the Anne of Green gables series)
(first world war... Jem's dog stayed at the rail station for 4 years waiting for him to retrun from war)

A black-and-yellow streak shot past the station agent. Dog Monday stiff? Dog Monday rheumatic? Dog Monday old? Never believe it. Dog Monday was a young pup, gone clean mad with rejuvenating joy.

He flung himself against the tall soldier, with a bark that choked in his throat from sheer rapture. He flung himself on the ground and writhed in a frenzy of welcome. He tried to climb the soldier's khaki legs and slipped down and groveled in an ecstasy that seemed as if it must tear his little body in pieces. He licked his boots and when the lieutenant had, with laughter on his lips and tears in his eyes, succeeded in gathering the little creature up in his arms Dog Monday laid his head on the khaki shoulder and licked the sunburned neck, making queer sounds between barks and sobs.

The station agent had heard the story of Dog Monday. He knew now who the returned soldier was. Dog Monday's long vigil was ended. Jem Blythe had come home.

This makes me sob no matter how many times I read it!

Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

“Be calm, now. Let that vile rabble alone.” right at the end of A Place of Greater Safety when Danton and Desmoulins are about to be guillotined. I don’t know why some lines just stick in your head.

I love “Arrange your face”!!

Also Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis makes me laugh so hard all the way through, every read ( Twice a year, every year).

Bit long, but captures exactly how I feel about 'the one that got away'...:

Afterwards, sometimes she dared to remember being in his arms. How, after only clumsy couplings with others, she and this man had straightaway come together as a perfect fit. How they moved together, in effortless synchronicity and with such deep pleasure. How when their exercise left them exhausted, she cried a little, so Vinius wiped her eye with his index finger, murmuring kindly, 'No tears!' before they both fell into profound sleep. How her troubled mind had drowned in peace, her body melting against his...

He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is. If it's only once, it must be good... He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody's dark world.

Lindsey Davis - Master and God

I love this, from Barchester Towers, about the ghastly Mr Slope.

‘His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision and cemented with much grease…….

His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef - beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. ….

His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced, straight and well formed, though I myself should have liked it better did it not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red-coloured cork.’

Henry’s proposal to Katherine in Shakespeare’s Henry V. I keep it on my phone and get goosebumps whenever I read it.

“And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee
right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other
places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that
can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do
always reason themselves out again. What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king.”

Gulp.

"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.

He would doubtless reply:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Fucked up the quote bit, sorry.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

On the Beach