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.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and Desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain

T.S.Eliot The Wasteland
Always loved it

Though she be but little, she is fierce

'So it goes'. Slaughterhouse Five.

Marge Piercy Braided Lives "Freedom is a daily necessity like water, and we love most loyally and longest those who allow us at least occasionally to vanish and wander the curious night"
I must read that book again, I first read it as a student and it's remained my favourite last paragraph of a book.

It was a queer sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
(opening line The Bell Jar)

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Poor Leo, poor Ted, poor Marion, poor all of them.

“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”

OR

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

Both dear old Plum.

Feather footed through the Plashy fen passes the questing vole
..

Scoop

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Last line of Wuthering Heights hard to beat IMHO

Sunset Song has several (extended) lines that always get to me:

"Nothing endures but the land."

"So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies."

"Sea and sky and folk who wrote and were learnéd, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not a bleak remove it held you and hurted you. And she had thought to leave it all!"

And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish - and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest - their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their millions of gallons of mothers' milk, millions of instances of small -talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for death's amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those millions of boys in all their humours, to be milled on the millstones of a coming war.

A Long Long Way, Sebastian Barry

What a great thread - There's hardly a duff line in Gatsby. And Prufrock likewise "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons"

From the Bard when Henry V rejects Falstaff (in Henry IV pt 2)
"I know thee not old man, fall to thy prayers
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man
So surfeit-swelled, so old and so profane
But being awaked I do despise my dream"

And as for Yeats

"But one man loved the Pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the Sorrows of your changing face"

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea cosy. "

From "I capture the castle" Dodie Smith who also wrote 101 Dalmations .

All the joys and angst of a teenager .

Also

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

From Invictus by William Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

It just resonates with me.