Aibu to ask for your favourite quotes from books

[Ohrobin]

Just that please!

Fav quotes from books and who wrote the book.

Cheers!

Mine is from Winnie the pooh - "how lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard"

I read it in Donna Tarts Secret History but it’s originally from Homers Odyssey
“Be still, says my heart, I am a solider and I have seen worse sights than this”

I love it so much I have it tattooed on me

The entire closing paragraph from Middlemarch is one of the most comforting things ever written.

Yer a wizard, Harry 😁

‘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.’

Nancy Mitford - The Pursuit of Love

"After all this time?”
“Always."

The whole of the opening to Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood gives me goosebumps, but this passage in particular. I have always loved seeing cities, towns, villages in the middle of the night when the streets are empty. The solitude of it. This encapsulates that feeling for me.

"Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.

And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before- dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood"

"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. "
Dumbledore, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

'I have never seen a dead body or a female nipple. This is what comes from living in a cul de sac.'

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾

"...all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope." From our favourite book Count of Monte Christo

Those words were part of of our wedding vows. We'd both been married before and gone through a lot so to us it means that we consider that, but don't hang on to past resentments because it's how we treat one another from the learning. That takes patience, love and trust but there are no guarantees, all we can do is wait and hope it won't destroy us.

“Nothing grows in my garden, only washing, and babies” - Polly Garter in Under Milk Wood.

And from T H White, The Sword in the Stone:
“The Wart Did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.”

What she would do, she did and made no-one responsible

Sons and Lovers

Loads, but this is one opening line that really makes me settle in for a good long read:
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

"All right then, I'll go to hell"
(Huckleberry Finn)

My girls and I are so pleased we could identify chumbabum’s quote.... assuming we are correct!

Me too, Anastasia - didn’t see that as I was looking up the other. I read that passage at my dad’s funeral.

I have so many typed up and written down, most are Pratchett ones.

‘I think I'll be a clown when I get grown,’ said Dill.
Jem and I stopped in our tracks.
‘Yes sir, a clown,’ he said. 'There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.'
You got it backwards, Dill,' said Jem. 'Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.'
‘Well I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.’ - To Kill a Mockingbird

‘After the war I'll love you, after the war, I'll love you, I'll love you forever, after the war.’ - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

@UrbaneSprawl What a wonderful choice. In that context it makes it even more beautiful I think.

'Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.'

17th-century French writer Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.

"You needn't worry about them," said his companion. "They'll be all right—and thousands like them. If you'll come along, I'll show you what I mean."

Absolutely joyous.

Loads, but this is one opening line that really makes me settle in for a good long read:
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

I opened the thread to say exactly this.

"I am haunted by humanity."

Said by Death in the Book Thief.

Two sprang immediately to mind.

Under Milk Wood again:

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

and the opening lines from Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals
And the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew
And August going out to the tin trumpets of nasturtiums
And the sunflowers’ Salvation Army blare of brass
And the spinster sitting in a deck-chair picking up stitches
Not raising her eyes to the noise of the ‘planes that pass
Northward from Lee-on-Solent.

Oooh @JacquesHammer I was coming on to post that very quote! I adore Nancy Mitford. She was a terribly wise woman but wore it very lightly.

"It was dickilicious"

Katie Price in one of the Jordan biographies 😂

Worryingly, what came to my mind first just now was:

'That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.' - Arundhati Roy

But then less depressingly,

'If only it could be like this always, always alone, always summer, the fruit always ripe'. - Evelyn Waugh.

‘I’m goin’ home. It’s jus’ about teatime an’ there’s cake’

William Brown