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.

@Clawdy

longtompot heartbreaking

It made me cry so much when I read it @Clawdy I had to put the book down. It's stayed with me ever since. Sadly the tv programme didn't do it justice imo.

The mention of Kate Atkinson in another thread brings two scenes to mind - when a woman exchanges money for a child, I think, on a bus step near the Merrion Centre in Leeds. The little girl has a bag of treasures and acquires a wand, and later in the story, when they hit a deer on the road north of Leeds she waves the wand above the poor dead deer. It's comical, and sad.

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

I always have this vision of hissing 'Well, thanks a bunch, especially as you're shorter than me!' back at him, but then I absolutely cannot bear that whole passage when each one of them has to screw up their courage and go into the flooded passage with no idea how far it extends -- it's so well-written it makes me insanely claustrophobic.

Such a good idea for a thread!

'Do not let this stranger see me eviscerated' - the main character in Nora Ephron's Heartburn on her cheating husband accompanying her to her emergency C-section. I think about that line all the time.

The bit in Handmaid's Tale where Offred remembers having a bath with her toddler daughter and smelling her head. That's what I remember about my DDs and if anything were ever to happen to them it would be my most visceral memory of their small years

Another great line from Wuthering Heights, from Heathcliff talking to Cathy:
'Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.'

Two heart-wrenching moments from more recent books (SPOILERS). One is in Haweswater by Sarah Hall - the moment when Jack falls to his death. The other is in Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins, when Nancy (who has a brain tumour) is playing the piano, and you see the scene from her POV, with her playing passionately and beautifully, and then you see the scene from her hysband Teddy's POV, and realise that Nancy is now totally incapable of playing any more, because her mind has been destroyed by her illness. It's a horrifying scene.

Going back two thousand years, I'd put the death of Hector in the Iliad as one of the saddest moments in fiction.

Bringing the tone down- don't read this if you're eating - the mention of a corpse's 'buttery green flesh' in Birdsong is the only thing I've read that has made me physically retch. A shock as I was reading on a train.

The butterflies that I remembered in my first post were actually moths. Now I wish I had looked for the book and quoted properly! Perhaps from now on I will always remember that.

There was a passage in American Psycho where he lists all the mundane things he did in his apartment and it finishes with something like ‘I tortured to death a small dog I had purchased at a pet store earlier that day’. Despite all the horror of that book I found that line the most chilling - it’s really stayed with me.

@Cornishblues

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.

Yes, I remember reading that too and also found it a haunting idea. I also can’t remember the name of the book!

St marys chronicles……… and the world went white.
This may have been because I listened to them and the narrator always put an emphasis on it.

In Tara Westovers memoir, Educated. When she takes ibuprofen for toothache and the pain disappears. She'd never experienced pain relief. Made me feel so sad for her.

Oh interesting! I was just talking about this the other day. It's a book I haven't read since the late 1970s so it's stayed with me! It was groundbreaking at the time, but I don't want to re-read it now and maybe find it wasn't that good after all.

In Erica Jong's Fear of Flying the heroine runs off from her husband and then turns up his hotel room. We don't know whether there'll be a reconciliation. The last line is something like, "I was just washing my hair when Bennett walked into the room."

That had a huge impact on me, that an author could end a book without telling the reader exactly what happened.

Kurt Vonnegut describes love as being 'a nation of two'

*Cornishblues

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.

Yes, I remember reading that too and also found it a haunting idea. I also can’t remember the name of the book!*

Its Hardy- Tess of the Durbevilles...I love that book

Lord of the Flies - "...the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Piggy,". Makes me shiver with sadness still, even though it's many years since I read the book.

@Wishimaywishimight

Lord of the Flies - "...the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Piggy,". Makes me shiver with sadness still, even though it's many years since I read the book.

Same.

"Lord of the Flies" was the first book that actually moved me emotionally. We read it at school in first year seniors, with an incredible English teacher who inspired me to become a writer.

I can still almost physically take myself back to that classroom on a summer afternoon and remember how it felt, listening to him reading it to us.

@EishetChayil. We must be very nearly the same age. My English teacher read this to us in 1st year of secondary school (in Ireland) so I would have been 12 or 13 at the time. Such a powerful book.

The last lines (spoiler alert) of I Capture The Castle (quoted from memory so may be wrong):
"Only half a page left of this journal. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you' like Father's cats on mats? No - even a broken heart doesn't merit a waste of good paper....
Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you."

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

Kalil Gibran on death: the whole chapter is wonderful but this last bit is so profound and truly comforting to me at least, having lost someone really precious...

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The diary of a provincial lady

The one about being a perfect mother which was an veiled insult at the dinner

Some good lines in the book

Robert Frost famous line - two roads

The bit in The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene when the priest has been caught and knows he's going to be put to death by firing squad in the morning. Devastating.

Scene in a book about a flood that covered the whole planet. Near the end, lots of groups of people (who now live on rafts) congregate in the sea where a flag is sticking out the ground. Eventually the waves lap over the ground and cover it completely...it is Mount Everest. It provoked such a feeling of horror and "what's the point of it all" in me.

@Cornishblues @littlepeas @Redyellowpink

“She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year. Her own birthday, and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought, one afternoon, that there was another date, of greater importance than all those; that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?”

• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

The opening chapter in Mephisto is a brilliant description of people schmoozing at a society ball. But it's Germany in the 1930s and the top dogs are the Nazi officers. It's chilling.