What is your favourite line of literature?

[SkaterGrrrrl]

I love the opening line of Rebecca, it gives me the shivers.

Also love this line, which the Literary Book Company have put on mugs, tea towels and so forth:

"'She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." - Louisa May Alcott.

[NuggetofPurestGreen]

That reminds me of Shakespeare in Love Takver where everyone who comes to audition for Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter does that speech and poor Shakespeare is

[Brices]

"The black snake of wounded vanity had been gnawing at his heart all night" Dostoevsky Crime & Punishment

"We toasted Bacchus and the Muses, and drank a wine rich as unicorn's blood" Mitchell Cloud Atlas
(Drinking red wine been an altered experience ever since this read!)

[KurriKurri]

'You may my glories and my states depose,
But not my griefs; still I am king of those' (from Richard II)

“I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”
(Sylvia Plath)

''I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.''

(Hopkins)

[BustyDeLaGhetto]

"There's a dog loose in the wood" from Watership Down. It's one of Fiver's premonitions and is so ominous and foreboding...I love it.

Also 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep' by Robert Frost.

I LIKE WOODS, CLEARLY.

[DumSpiroSpero]

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be -- and whenever I look up there will be you." from Far From the Madding Crowd.

I love that too, but having initially heard it as a romantic quote in the Vicar of Dibley, I pmsl at Bathsheba's reaction when I read the book.

"No I don't want to marry you...Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband."

I have always loved "Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly."

...from Jane Eyre

Also "I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at the worst time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine...”
? Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[Clawdy]

"Hey,Boo," I said...... from To Kill A Mockingbird.

[caroldecker]

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about - From Love in the time of cholera

[AnneElliott]

It is a truth universally acknowledge that a single man of large fortune it's be in want of a wife. P&P Austen

The ending to the Tale of two cities. I think it goes "there is no greater love, than of laying down ones life for a friend".

[BaconAndAvocado]

"The truth is a lemon meringue" Mr. Gum. Marvellous.

[fuzzpig]

My favourite is one that makes me laugh, from LOTR:

"When she arrived later in the day, she took the point at once. But she also took the spoons."

[RiverTam]

Dorothy L sayers has some good lines, quite long so can't remember exactly off the top of my head (plus I've been to the pub) but one, from Strong Poison, set in the early 1930s when people were still wearing corsets, goes something like:

'... said Mrs Featherstone, a woman who's violently compressed figure suggested she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last.'

Excellent.

and, of course, that best opening line ever, from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith:

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.'

[WhatsTheWordHummingbird]

"It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live"

Chills.

This totally hit a nerve with me and I feel has genuinely improved my outlook on life.

[Dancingdreamer]

“Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.”


? Thomas Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge

Sums up so much of life

[nkf]

"I've danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile, and many a long day; and it is hard to begrudge me this one visit." Far From The Madding Crowd.

Oh, how I longed to have the courage to call a daughter Bathsheba. And "skittish" is such a delightful word.

[nkf]

"Her voice is full of money." The Great Gatsby.

[LifeHuh]

I wish my favourite line was more "classic", but I didn't even have to think about it . "what can the harvest hope for but the care of the Reaper Man" (Terry Pratchett)
Goodness knows why,I find it comforting...
KurriKurri, I love that Hopkins poem.

[LeBearPolar]

This line from The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time most loved:

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking."

and this one from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead has long been a favourite:

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

Practically everything in Gatsby but this one is haunting:

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

[LeBearPolar]

I am just reading The Book Thief for the first time and it is full of gorgeous lines:

“The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both."

and this one is so frighteningly true:

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.”

[schoolclosed]

Ooh, Hopkins.

Oh the mind, mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed
Hold them cheap may that ne'er hung there

[fuzzpig]

LeBearPolar I'm finally reading The Book Thief too! Just started part two. Really enjoying it :)

[HelpfulChap]

I love this line.

Its better to be unhappy and know the worst that be happy in a fools paradise.

Dostoyesvky.

I love Dostoyevksy - Crime and Pushiment is possibly my favourite book.

[HelpfulChap]

THAN not that.

[CreepyLittleBat]

AnneElliott I think the friend quote is about Baloo, from The Jungle Book. But the end of A Tale Of Two Cities makes me cry too.

[destructogirl]

"...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

[milkwasabadchoice]

"We live as we dream - alone."
From The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

"Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow
The small raine down can raine.
Christ, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!"
Anon. Sixteenth century.