Favourite lines or passages from books?

[giamtGiffaffe]

Please :)

That's T S Eliot.

@Slicacakeandacuppatea wonderful quote. I think A Little Princess is relatively overlooked as a book, compared to The Secret Garden - I loved it so much as a child - and it has a lot to say about resilience, imagination and magic.

Linda at the end of the Pursuit of Love, waiting for Fabrice to arrive:

"She lay back, and all was light and warmth. Life, she thought, is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake and here is one of them. The earlly morning sun shone past her window on to the river, her ceiling danced with water-reflections. The Sunday silence was broken by two swans winging slowly upstream, and then by the chugging of a little barge, while she waited for that other sound, a sound more intimately connected with the urban love affair than any except the telephone bell, that of a stopping taxicab. Sun, silence and happiness."

'Oh how we danced'

Stephen King - 11.22.63

My user name is another quotation from the same book!

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,
Minds innocent and quiet take
That as a hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love ans
in my love am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
Richard Lovelace. To Althea from Prison

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known"

A Tale of Two Cities (my username says it all!)

Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne in Persuasion.

I remember this book being read on Jackanory when I was a kid. Loved it.

'All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us'
'Death is just another path, one which we all must take'
Some of Gandalf's words of wisdom in Lord of the Rings.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.
-Gabriel Oak
Thomas Hardy. Far from the madding crowd

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

F Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

Go then. There are other worlds than these.

@YellowPlumbob #iknow

--Do you love Me? Alice asked.

• No, I don't love you! replied the White Rabbit.

Alice frowned and clasped her hands together as she did whenever she felt hurt.

• See? replied the White Rabbit.

Now you're going to start asking yourself what makes you so imperfect and what did you do wrong so that I can't love you at least a little.

You know, that's why I can't love you. You will not always be loved Alice, there will be days when others will be tired and bored with life, will have their heads in the clouds, and will hurt you.

Because people are like that, they somehow always end up hurting each other's feelings, whether through carelessness, misunderstanding, or conflicts with themselves.

If you don't love yourself, at least a little, if you don't create an armor of self-love and happiness around your heart, the feeble annoyances caused by others will become lethal and will destroy you.

The first time I saw you I made a pact with myself: "I will avoid loving you until you learn to love yourself."

• Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland

@Twentypast
Interesting. Which chapter?

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.

Totally agree, stopping to look at everything is so important

That Alice quote isn’t in the book, I don’t think. It reads like a piece of fan-fiction.

The internet is a sod for misattribution. I’ve come a cropper myself before now.

The Second Coming by W B Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

My favourite ‘Alice’ quote is probably “After that it’s all feasting and fun” and also “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but never jam today” both ‘Looking glass’ I think.

Agatha Christie: A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

Love the Middlemarch quote above - 'the roar that is the other side of silence'.

Kazantzakis: I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.

Edith Egar: Hope is an investment in curiosity.

John Michael loved his mother, not as much as she loved him, for there is no son living who loves his mother as he is loved by her, but she comprised for him the world of home and affection, and he hated leaving her.

Somerville & Ross.

The wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

The last line of Emma by Jane Austen

Talking of mothers. Was it in the ‘Satanic Verses’ where a man cries for his mother every night for a week, and when she doesn’t come back from the dead to comfort him he concludes there can be no afterlife.
The other phrase I remember from the ‘Satanic Verses’ is somebody being ‘big in ball bearings’.

@Twentypast what is that quote from?! Not a part of the book.

@Macguffin69 love that one. Very prescient

andrew marvell “The Garden”, on the wonders of a garden to rest, inspire and bring joy in its “green shade”, particularly:

”Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.”