Share your favourite literary quote

[SheHasAWildHeart]

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
~ Hamlet, William Shakespeare

[clary]

Justlikeastar can't believe I forgot that one from Great Gatsby - fave last line of a book.

All of mine seem to be about dying or regrets or what might have been or what is past...

[stoneysongs]

Philip Larkin fearing death in Aubade:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

[CryHavoc]

MadameDePompom's made me well up straight away.
Most of mine have already been mentioned - the one for To Kill a Mockingbird, and the I am Heathcliff passage from Wuthering Heights.
I have to add,
'And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every single minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being 'in love', which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen away we found that we were one tree and not two.' - Louis de Berniers, Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
I love it.

[NapQueen]

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live" - Albus / Jk Rowling.

That one literally changed my outlook on life. Before it I was always distracted by how others lives were seemingly better than mine. I read it, realised what I was doing. It was like an epiphany, my life is 1000 times better for it.


And....

"Don't be afraid", "I am not afraid Harry, I am with you" - another Dumbledore / JKR. The most powerful man in her world felt protected by the (in comparison) weaker and less knowledgeable boy.

[NapQueen]

Oh! And I have another but for a daft reason!

"Call me Ishmael".... ive never read Moby Dick but I watched Matilda as a kid and at the end when she reads this line to Miss Honey and the warmth of knowing she is now loved and cherished and nurtured just melts into your heart alongside that line.

I probably should read the book.

[CryHavoc]

Also,

' "After all this time?"
"Always," said Snape'

[TwllBach]

I'm not sure where it's from but I love this -

Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

[AgathaAsprin]

Agree wholeheartedly with the Great Gatsby and Bell Jar quotes upthread and also 'past is a foreign country' in The Go Between. I also love the last line of that book. I'm paraphrasing but something like 'the south west prospect of the hall, long since hidden from my memory, sprang into view'. Also Pablo Neruda 'I want to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees' and the opening of Rebecca - swoon. AND the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech. OK, I'll stop now!!

[PurpleAlerts]

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever"
Keats
Ode on a grecian urn.

I don't like the poem but my lovely Grandad used to quote this sarcatically when something was obviously ugly!

[HalloweenQueen1]

Oscar Wilde gave good quote

One of my favourites is

Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them more

Dorothy Parker wrote this about Wilde and it makes me smile

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it

[theluckiest]

I love a good quote...

'he was as solitary as an oyster' Dickens. Just a perfect simile.

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams' Roald Dahl

'All children, except one, grow up' JM Barrie. I teach Y6 and Peter Pan is absolutely full of moving quotes about love, children and magic. Last year, I made each child a notebook with a Peter Pan quote as a leavers gift.....there were quite a few tears!!

[MarchEliza]

So many from Mervyn Peake, but especially this description of Gormenghast's Tower of Flints:
"This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."

And from Brideshead Revisited: "The fortnight in Venice past quickly and sweetly; perhaps too sweetly. I was drowning in honey, stingless."

And from Hamlet "Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew"

[spirallinganxiety]

"No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive,"

From "The Dead Woman" by Pablo Neruda and recited by Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman in "Truly Madly Deeply".

Totally beautiful in Spanish:

"No, perdóname.
Si tú no vives,
si tú, querida, amor mío, si tú
te has muerto,
todas las hojas caerán en mi pecho,
lloverá sobre mi alma noche y día,
la nieve quemará mi corazón,
andaré con frío y fuego
y muerte y nieve,
mis pies querrán marchar hacia donde tú duermes, pero seguiré vivo,"

[spirallinganxiety]

And - not a book but a film - "Caro Diario" by Nanni Moretti - in the section called "Isole" during which Nanni and his friend Gerardo travel from Aeolian island to island looking for a good place to write but never really finding it:

"sono felice solo in mare, nel tragitto tra un'isola che ho appena lasciato e un'altra che devo ancora raggiungere."

"I am only happy when at sea, during the journey between an island that I have just left and one that I have not yet arrived at"

[Paffle]

Spiralling my BIL read this when we buried my sister's ashes.

Mine is:

" I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. "

[AristotlesTrousers]

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier

[BerylMeeps]

"What's a buttload?" Asked Frank.
Granuaile rescued me with her superior knowledge of indefinite measurements.
"Slightly more than a shitload but much less than a fuckton."

(Frank, Atticus and Granuaile)

Kevin Hearne

[Trooperslane]

Both my wedding poems are here.

"Life starts all over when it gets crisp in the Fall"

The Great Gatsby.

[Witchend]

There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

CSLewis (Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

[EsmesBees]

Another Pratchett: Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.

[NatashaBolkonskaya]

Ooh, lovely thread!

Hamlet is full of quotable stuff. My favourites are "A little more than kin and less than kind" and

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions."

My favourite poet is Louis MacNeice and I could quote him forever but one I love
is :
"World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural."

And I love this from Barbara Trapido's 'Brother of the More Famous Jack', it strikes a chord. Jonathan is complaining to his mother about his new English teacher:

" 'The bloody fool asked me to paraphrase "heaven's cherubim horsed upon the sightless courier's of the air", he says, thumping about. 'What's the fucking good of paraphrasing it? It sounds better the way it is.' "

[BeccaMumsnet]

Hi all - we're going to pop this over to "What we're reading" so it doesn't go poof.

[KeithLeMonde]

My favourite Austen quote is this little snippet from Sense and Sensibility - she is so much cleverer and more acerbic than the bonnets-and-Mr-Darcy-in-a-wet-shirt brigade think she is:

Lady Middleton could no longer endure such a conversation, and therefore exerted herself to ask Mr. Palmer if there was any news in the paper.

"No, none at all," he replied, and read on.

[enchantedfairytale]

I love Tennyson's 'Maud'

Ah, what shall I be at fifty
Should Nature keep me alive
If I find the world so bitter
When I am but twenty-five