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.

The great Nancy Mitford

But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.'
Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.'

From Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski:

Hillary was a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print. He would read anything sooner than nothing, fragments of sporting news torn up in a lavatory, a motor journal on an hotel table, an out-of-date evening paper picked up in a bus. He would covetously eye the books held by strangers in trains, forcing them into conversation until he could offer his own read book in exchange for something new. But if, by ill-luck, he was reduced to reading nothing but haphazard chance finds that offered his mind only the bare fact of being print, he would become dreary, unhappy, uneasy, like a gourmet who suffers from indigestion after eating bad food.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

TS Eliot - The Hollow Men

It's bleak but I love it...

Gradgrind and Luisa discussing one evening whether she should marry Bounderby. She stares at the 'melancholy mad elephants' (factories) and says all day long they work away but when the night falls fire breaks out and Gradgrind says, "I do not see the application of this remark.' I remember first reading it and aching for her that her father didn't care enough about her to advise against a loveless marriage with a hideous man.

I'd like to add a glimpse of Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm, who gets everything a bit wrong, trying to join in the celebration from the edge of the crowd. His cardigan has worked up all wrinkly round his waist.

Less highbrow than some of these but the scene in Jane Green’s Jemima J where skinny Jemima goes on a food binge at the food hall of the mall and wolfs down noodles from the Chinese stall and hot pastries coated in sugar from a paper bag without even tasting them!
I read it years ago but just recall the imagery so clearly. The way it was described was just so vivid and really stuck with me!

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
‘Do not let evil enter your heart, it will make a home there’

I can't quote from it but the scene where the ship with Dracula on board rushes in to Whitby harbour is amazing.

I can’t quite remember the wording, but there’s a bit near the end of Bring Up The Bodies, where Cromwell has been talking to Cranmer about Anne Boleyn, who has been asking Cranmer if her good deeds will get her into heaven, and Cranmer saying that the point is to do good deeds for their own sake, not to get points from god (I’m paraphrasing, obviously!). And Cromwell imagines her climbing the steps to heaven, her good deeds weighing around her neck and wrists like jewels.

The ending of "All Quiet on the Western Front" from which the title is taken - the main character is killed on a day when there is so little military action that the army report reads only "All quiet on the Western Front." Really brought home to me the perceives unimportance of each individual life in times of war.

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is."
Said by Granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

@WhatsGoingOnHereThen

OMG - that sentence from One Day will stay with me forever. The most devastating and profound bit of writing ever.

“I feel like the word ‘shatter’”.

Offred in The Handmaid‘s Tale, sitting in her room, every word and movement in her life bound by someone else’s rules. That line summed up perfectly the tension in such profoundly enforced stillness.

@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.

It's in one of the Anne of Green Gables books, Anne of the Island possibly?

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.'

It just sticks in my head!

A word in for Terry Pratchett.

(on whether 'Second Sight' is all that valuable:) "First sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking."

A line from a Saki short story always tickles me:

His socks commanded one's attention without losing one's respect

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Beautiful writing and could describe the time we’re currently living through.

From the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves:

“I’m speechless,” said my mother, which wasn’t even remotely true.

That line really made me chuckle.
Also the final paragraph of the book - the ending was so beautifully written I had to read the last page twice and blubbed each time. So many emotions after such a wonderful tale.

I don't really know why, but the first line in Lucy Maud Montgomery's book, Jane of Lantern Hill:

"Gay Street, Jane thought, did not live up to its name."

I loved that book as a pre-teen.

i remember learning about a piece of literature in English called the pedestrian and the bit he walks outside is described as

There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside you

@MrsMercury

i remember learning about a piece of literature in English called the pedestrian and the bit he walks outside is described as

There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside you

Wouldn't it be lovely if Christmas Eve were always like that.

@JaninaDuszejko

Ha, the Tess quote was the inspiration for One Day by David Nicholls.

You beat me to it! David Nicholls says in his acknowledgments: A debt is owed to a Thomas Hardy, for unwittingly suggesting the premise.

We visit the protagonists every 15th July between 1988 and 2007, and it's only towards the end of the novel that it become apparent that's because it's Emma's death day.
Loving this thread even though I'm late to the party!

He had a fine aesthetic face precise in his movements wearing lavender water and leading a greyhound, as he got close the dog proved to be better behaved than the lavender water
From a Gavin Lyall

@celestebellman

On a lighter note, ‘I have just realised I have never seen a dead body or a real female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul de sac.’ - Adrian Mole

You say that but I cried and cried reading The Prostate Years. Sue Townsend was an incredible writer.