What is your favourite literary quote and why?

Amirani

To Kill A Mockingbird:
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

Ulysses
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

Gneez

From Green Mars, by kim stanley robinson.

I died from a mineral and a plant became,
Died from a plant, took a sentient frame,
Died from the beast, donned a human dress,
When by my dying did I ever grow less . . .

A farsi poem, by Rumi Jalaluddin.

[-0-]

I love this, just because it is relevant to my current situation as I'm moving to America tomorrow.

It's from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.

I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer.

The Mad Hatter

I don't know if haiku are allowed, but if they are then:

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら

This world of dew --
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet…

-Kobayashi Issa

AnnyHallsal

In Howard's End, Forster describes, "that abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love."

I think that's beautiful and often true.

epgc3fyqirnbsx

Barry Kent's daffodils from Adrian Mole Diaries

Long
Tall
Stiif
Nice
In a vase
In a room
In my House

itac

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be"
"Dirk Gently" in Douglas' Adams' book-The long dark tea-time of the soul. Very apt, and very true to most of my life over the last decade of my life.
I also love how Adams has quite a beautiful way with words when he's not making me literally laugh out loud.

epgc3fyqirnbsx

"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once!"

-Raskolnikov : Crime and Punishment

obplayer

As one who has wandered quite a bit

BREATHES there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd


Sir Walter Scott

Gordon Gecko

"I see him there bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
in each hand, like an old stone savage armed,
he moves in darkness as it seems to me,
not of woods only and the shade of trees..."

Frost

Difficult Times

"What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"

Walter Scott.

"It aint about fair Little Bill, you should have thought about that before you decorated your tavern with my friend"
(sic)

Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

thebullkf

In the stinking darkness under the barn, he raised his shaggy head. His yellow stupid eyes gleamed. 'I hunger,' he whispered

Henry Ellender- The Wolf




"Oh yes, we all float - and when you're down here with us, you'll float too!"

Pennywise the clown. (IT)

"In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts

(IT)

eskimocat

"Life is difficult."

The opening sentence to The Road Less Travelled, by M.Scott Peck.

Took me a long time to understand that first line


Another one I like is :

"A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet".

The Play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. This one often pops into my head, especially if I am having difficulty in seeing someone elses point of view often swiftly followed by "to each his own"

essyrock

"I am multi talented, I can talk and piss you off at the same time"
This one is my favorite quote....

GO_Bear

You can slay me all you like for hopping on a band wagon ! But I avoided these books because my house mate was reading them and I was reading the wheel of time !

After watching the first few episodes of the new TV show ! Which is brilliant ( ye can see where this is going ! ) I picked up book one of Game of Thrones

Am a few chapters in but a simple quote I find really awesome !

Winter is coming

:D

not_so_civil

*you appear to have no useful skilll or talent whatsoever: have you considered going into teaching*

From Mort by terry pratchett

Don't quote it in school though, they tend to frown on it :P

Da Shins Kelly

'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'
~ Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.

When you come from a somewhat dysfunctional family (like I have), happiness can look very samey from the outside. Yet, when you get to know people better, and work past the barriers of false happiness that people put up around themselves, you realise that everyone has their own unique problems and there are so many ways in which people can go wrong. It often seems like happiness is so simple, yet there are a million, complicated ways in which someone can be unhappy.

nompere

I'm not the first in this thread to quote from John Steinbeck. I first read East of Eden about 40 years ago, and this description stayed with me. I read it again about ten years ago. I suppose you need to be able to remember how the "top of the milk" was a richer colour than the rest of the contents for the imagery to work at its best.

"These too are of a burning color--not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

girlonfire

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am". The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.

The first time I read this book, I felt as though I could breathe for it resonated so deeply with me. The above quote reminds me of my strength.

The Princess Bride

"The great thing about the Internet:It gives everyone a voice.The bad thing about the Internet:It gives everyone a voice."

Harlan Coben 'Live Wire'.




I like it because it's true.

Dr. Bad Touch

"The only true madness is loneliness,
the monotonous voice in the skull
that never stops
because never heard."

From John Montague's the wild dog rose. I don't even know why but the first time I read these lines it resonated hugely with me and has stuck ever since. A beautiful, tragic poem.

Einhard

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother

Henry V, 4, 3.

Sends a shiver down my spine, and the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up whenever I hear it. Written 500 years ago, and referring to martial valour, but I think it resonates even today, and in all situations where people are brought together and bond through a difficult shared experience.

I sing of arms and the man...

the Aeneid

Only 7 brief words, describing nothing of import in themselves, but I think they are hugely powerful. Like the first words of 1984, they immediately convey a sense of how the work will proceed, and set the mood of the reader.

Kiva.D

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

Because I believe it.

aine100

This is a bit off topic but does anyone know what or where these lines come from? They were recited to me in a pub in Dublin when I was 17 and supposed to be seeing the Kremlin Gold on a school tour (circa 1992-1993) and I'd love to know what they are from. (snuck out from seeing the Gold and had a lovely time in a pub drinking pints of cider with my friend- I nearly missed the train home!!)

"Have you ever heard tell of the Moll in the moon, who for want of the thousand married stars would not make love to the clown and the sun, oh stupid lovely Moll in the Moon.. is it old you are getting instead of young?"
forgive me if I have got them wrong, it was a long time ago,
thanks

Manach

“Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

It echoes with a traditional sense of self reliance and reaching to be better.

marienbad

'I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

T.S Eliot -The Waste Land

I could have picked anyone of dozens but that one has always stuck with me for some reason .
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sadie06

By far my favourite is the closing paragraph of The Dead by James Joyce…it devastated me the first time I read it. As that is a rather clichéd choice, I will go with something that resonated with me personally at a particular moment in time.

From Ian McEwan's Atonement, as a mother notices her youngest child advancing towards adolescence.

'There was a time one would have received a bright and intricate response that would in turn have unfolded silly and weighty questions to which Emily gave her best answers, and while the meandering hypotheses they indulged were hard to recall in detail now, she knew she never spoke so well as she had to her eleven-year-old last-born. No dinner table, no shaded margin of a tennis court ever heard her so easily and richly associative. Now the demons of self-consciousness and talent had struck her daughter dumb, and though she was no less loving […] Emily mourned the passing of an age of eloquence. She would never again speak like that to anyone, and this was what it meant to want another child. She would soon be forty seven'.