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 was thinking about Pride and Prejudice recently and realised that all my favourite quotes are from Mr Bennett. He’s sarcastic and shrewd when it comes to finding people’s faults to amuse himself with.

We live to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn. This feels especially poignant in modern society!

When Lizzy confesses to him that she’s engaged to Mr Darcy and he calls him a proud and unpleasant sort of man but that would be nothing if she really liked him.

The scene in ' One Day' is definitely one for me. Remember reading it on a flight and weeping.

Also by John Magee, pilot who was killed in WW2 -

I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings

Put out my hand and touched the face of God

When my friend's son died I wrote some of the poem in the card I sent as I felt that would be his soul.

A brilliant sentence from The Shipping News "for the devil had long ago taken a shine to Ted Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle name was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork"
such a wonderful description, I feel like I know exactly what Ted looks like!

The opening sentence of Chapter four of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders has stayed with me:

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently, the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.

Ooof!

"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing- absolutely nothing -half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing," he went on dreamily......................

This, from Penelope Lively's "Moon Tiger"

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

And the phrase about Captain Corelli - "he remained a man of honour because he knew no other way to be" or something like that.

Great thread.

Agree with the One Day scene. It was so sudden and shocking but also summed up just how quickly life can end.

The Crucible was a play that always stuck with me from school. The ending in particular where John dies rather than lies. Very thought provoking in terms of morals.

A thread that got deleted this morning reminded me of Bertie Wooster saying “there’s some raw work at the font” although I’m cheating there because I got that from the telly.
The endings of Jane Gardam’s short stories are brilliant. I think the first one I read was in ‘the Sidmouth letters’ about a bunch of ghastly posh women meeting to remember a nanny they had all exploited. Their comeuppance is wonderful.
I’m enjoying this thread. I will be back with more.

A couple of one-liners:
In Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood actress Sally Bowles is robbed by a conman. When the police say,
you mean you spent the night with a stranger you had only met that day!
She replies, but you see Herr Kommissar, he wasn’t a stranger: he was my fiancé.

For some reason Flashman’s line: “the Victorian conscience is a mystery to me, thank God” tickles me. It would be a good line to work into an essay on ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ I imagine.

"And she came".

I know it's a children's book, but I was reading Owl Babies to DD last night and it struck me how wonderful that line is, with the illustration of the owl sweeping through the woods. It just gives a wonderful feeling of peace and reassurance.

SPOILERS

The last line of Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

I sobbed for hours after reading that and it has stuck with me.

Tom Stoppard, Rozencratz and Guildenstern are Dead 'We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke and the presumption that once our eyes watered'

Billy Liar’s grandmother saying “he want to get himself dressed of a morning” and “he wants to burn that raincoat.”

Not a line from a book, but I watched a documentary about Dunblane, one of the children has a poem by A A Milne on their tombstone. It sums up perfectly what young children are like, but the last line makes me cry.

When I was one,
I just begun.

When I was two,
I was nearly new.

When I was three,
I was hardly me.

When I was four,
I was not much more.

When I was five,
I was just alive.

But now I’m six,
I'm as clever as clever.

So I think I'll be six now,
forever and ever!

That’s so sad @sashh
I’m glad they found something so fitting.

From Grassic Gibbon's 'Sunset Song'

Ewan,the heroine's husband, ruined and coarsened by the first world war, is charged with desertion and sentenced to death. A friend gets into his cell and they talk. Ewan talks of his wife and the farm. So simply and beautifully realised, it is absolutely heart rending.

The last line from A Prayer for Owen Meaney

SPOILERS

"O God please give him back! I shall keep asking You".

I read it shortly after a bereavement and it pierced my heart. It still does.

@Bobbybobbins

thank you for guiding me to that poem.

I don’t have it to hand so can’t quote from it but the death of Ruth May in The Poisonwood Bible is the single most moving thing I’ve ever read in a novel.

@AtlanticCityProof it's perfect isn't?

@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.

Oooo

@pangolina

"O God please give him back! I shall keep asking You". This is so sad.

lovely thread, thank you.
from Brideshead Revisited 'I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.'
The protagonist is lighting Julia's cigarette (who will be his lover, many years hence).
Bad
in the beginning of an Ian McEwen novel (which I don't even like that much) someone dies because a balloon he is holding onto goes up and he holds on too long. I'm sure there are more horrifying things than the description of the dead body, but I can't get it out of my head. Years and years afterwards.

The Handmaid's Tale. "We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy" pops into my head often.

@Welshwabbit

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.

One of my favourite books and that ending paragraph is devastating.