Your favorite excerpt/quote from all of literature

[Hyacinthine]

I just wondered if anyone here has an excerpt/quote from all of literature that you love more than you can say. I love a lot of different books and poems, but one excerpt in particular has always meant the most to me, so much so that I had it tattooed between my shoulder blades. From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot:

Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

[Kyriakos]

Hm, good question :)

I am not sure if i have a clear favourite. Perhaps the description of how Raskolnikov escaped from the house after he murdered the two women.

Also in Kafka's "The trial", when Joseph K. is trying to get out of the building which belongs to the court, and the door opens, without him being able to realise what is going on.

[Alexander III]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

- Hamlet

[Dodo25]

"There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books."

- John Hershey, Hiroshima

[Alexander III]

Oh another favorite is

"It is found.
What? Eternity.
It is the sun
Gone with the sea."

[lupercal]

'yes I said yes I will Yes.'
last few words of Joyce's 'Ulysses'

[Seasider]

From Shakespeare's Sonnet 94

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds,
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds

My partner died in 2000 and her ashes are interred in a church near where I live that has been there in one form or another since the 8th century. I have made arrangements to have my ashes interred with hers and on the stone with both our names and dates I will have inscribed the final line of Philip Larkin's poem The Arundel Tombs

What Will Survive of Us is Love.

So I guess that is my favourite quote.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

A favorite:

"Ill fares the land where hast'ning ills a prey,
where wealth accumulates and men decay:
Princes and Lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them as a breath has made;
But a bold peasentry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied"
Oliver Goldsmith - "The Deserted Village"


.

[Emil Miller]

There are so many literary quotes that can be made with regard to this thread but here are two that really tell it as it is.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
Charles Baron de Montesquieu 1689-1755

A little rule, a little sway
A sunbeam on a winter's day
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.

John Dyer 1700-1758

[KilgoreT]

"Gradually the rains became lighter and less frequent, and earth and sky once again became separate. The rain fell in thin, slanting showers through sunshine and quiet breeze. Children no longer stayed indoors but ran about singing:

The rain is falling, the sun is shining,
Alone Nnadi is cooking and eating

Nwoye always wondered who Nnadi was and why he should live all by himself, cooking and eating. In the end he decided that Nnadi must live in that land of Ikemefuna's favorite story where the ant holds his court in splendor and the sands dance forever."

From Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Not sure why, but that last sentence really stuck in my head as a beautiful image.

I also found this little gem the other day in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

"Like the ballroom in St. Patrick's Cathedral, there was none in these trousers."

Took me a minute to get it but that cracks me up.

[Communications]

Call me Ishmael.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

[bex79]

My partner died in 2000 and her ashes are interred in a church near where I live that has been there in one form or another since the 8th century. I have made arrangements to have my ashes interred with hers and on the stone with both our names and dates I will have inscribed the final line of Philip Larkin's poem The Arundel Tombs

What Will Survive of Us is Love.

So I guess that is my favourite quote.[/QUOTE]

I just wanted to say I think this is beautiful x

[kiki1982]

My signature of Cyrano de Bergerac:

"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins."

"I fear that the soul will empty itself with those vain pastimes and that the finest means to the finest end will be but the end."

It is the principle that I live for. I was so struck by it that I cried... Both by its beauty (in French) and its cleverness.

[keilj]

"Toff. Not enough gun"
-the Saint of Killers

[Lokasenna]

One that always sticks in my mind:

"His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
and be among her cloudy trophies hung."

-Ode to Psyche, Keats

[keilj]

there are so many great quotes - too many to list. especially in context

like this one from The Possessed. Which has greater meaning becasue it culminated after chapters and chapters of establishing the profound (though strange) relationship between Varvara and Stepan. And then Stepan finally got hurt to the point of departing from her forever:

"'Oh, my dreams. Farewell. Twenty years. Alea jacta est!'
His face was wet with a sudden gush of tears. He took his hat...
... 'Alea jacta est!' He made her a deep bow, and returned home, almost dead with emotion."

[dfloyd]

"The End"