A scene or a line which you remember

[upinaballoon]

Without reaching for "Wuthering Heights" I remember that at the end of the book the narrator (Lockwood?) walks on the moor and he sees butterflies dancing or fluttering among the harebells and he cannot imagine an unquiet spirit lying in that earth. I think that's the gist of it. Corrrect me if I am way off the mark.

Please share a scene or a line from a book.

I always remember in the book One Day where the female character (Emma?)...

SPOILERS

Falls off her bike and is hit by a car and dies and it says something like

'amd everything she every thought and everything she ever knew was gone'

Given you've gone on such a journey of their lives/thoughts/feelings I was shocked. I just kept re-reading.

I sometimes think about it now, especially if I'm worrying about something, that all my worries will just die with me, so what's the point?

In the shell seekers by Rosalind pilcher (it’s been a while since I read it but this always stuck with me) the main character had a wartime romance and he died in the allied landings. Many years later she is sitting in her garden and has a heart attack. She knows she is dying but then ‘he was coming. He was there.’ I just thought that was so beautiful, after all those years to hear the footsteps of the person you love most in the world, and they come to ‘escort you over.’

oh no... he is the image of his mother (Cadfael tells his friend)

And all the light went out of the day - I can't actually remember where this is from!

Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces. - opening of Pyramids, by the incomparable Pterry

Is The Shell Seekers the one where the lady has a green dress?

I don’t remember a green dress specifically but I read it so long ago- when the bbc did the top 100 favourite books. I just looked that up...2003 😂

From David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas:

Anger sparked in Timothy Cavendish like forks in microwaves.

The bit in Wolf Hall when he sees his little daughter alive for the last time, wearing her Christmas angel wings and being swallowed up be shadows as she walks away. It was such a beautiful, simple metaphor for death and really moved me.

Another one from Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light.

Talking about Thomas Cromwell’s unfussy riding prowess,

‘He just gets on a horse, and goes somewhere.’

Summed his character up beautifully, I thought.

“So, they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

I have grown up boys now. Makes me cry.

Gandalf and one of the hobbits talking about Gollum and that he deserved to die.

Gandalf says “many die who deserve life” - and if the hobbit can’t hand out life, he shouldn’t hand out death either.

A very gentle way to turn someone from thoughts of revenge.

From Slaughterhouse Five:
“She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence: 'How did I get so old?‘“

There are probably so many more but some that spring to mind (SPOILERS)
The poisoning scene in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is possibly the best-written scene in any book.
I also adore Tom Wolfe and the party scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities is my favourite book chapter ever 😄

Wuthering Heights for me too, "the eternal rocks beneath" bit.

Or when Durathror tells Colin and Susan that "Courage is fear mastered" when in the flooded tunnels in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

And lines from The Wasteland come to me all the time. "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many" pops up every time I'm somewhere busy.

the last lines of Middlemarch about Dorothea

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

In Jude the Obscure, Jude is working for a thatcher and, from a roof, sees the spires of Oxford in the distance. Most beautiful passage in a book I've ever read.

The bit in The Poisonwood Bible where its raining torrential rain and the Congolese children are chanting following the death of their friend.

That last line of the last chapter of Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close - where the little boy is imagining a different world where his father had not gone to work at the Twin Towers that fateful day. He says he would have come home, they would have played together, laughed and talked, and ends saying sadly "We would have been safe."

@Sheerheight you have reminded me of another bit in the Poisonwood Bible SPOILERS the snake bite scene. So effective and horrifying

1. Oh,Clawdy, that's so sad.

1. I've read The Poisonwood Bible and the mention of Africa made me remember that at school we read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and there are the four famous words "Mistah Kurtz, he dead".

Oh @LunaNorth absolutely

Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died. sobs

longtompot heartbreaking

There's a chapter in Catch-22, quite late in the book, called 'The Eternal City', where Yossarian is walking around Rome and everywhere he sees desolation and depravity. Violence, rape, cruelty to animals, child abuse, drunk people, homeless people, and up until then the book had been darkly funny, but that whole chapter is a gut punch and drives home the sheer horror of the war, and this is before we get to the bit where Aarfy - who'd previously seemed like a bit of a goofball - rapes and murders a maid. It made me understand what a friend of mine said when he said that Catch-22 would make you feel really small by the time you'd finished.

Also Wuthering Heights: whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

P&P: I cannot bear to think that he is alive in the world and thinking ill of me.

The Sea: We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

Rather morbidly, in a book I’ve read there’s a remark about how birthdays are marked every year but how the unknown future date of one’s death goes past unremarked each year. The idea has rather haunted me but I can’t remember where I read it, even though I came across it a second time years after the first and having wondered in between times where I’d read it.

There is a line in a Lionel Shriver novel (I have forgotten which) where a character breaks into her ex's flat that they used to share together and "walks around in the past". It really struck me as the perfect description.