What is your favourite/s line or passage from literature?

Question

Could be from ancient days like Homer or modern times. Plays, books, novellas, anything.
Anyone from any era from any nationality no matter how obscure or well known.

Answer 1

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
[the opening of "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov

Answer 2

"...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."
And, "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it...the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old..." Jack Kerouac from On the Road.

"Because whether you murder or not, that's the trouble, it makes no difference in the maddening void which doesn't care what we do - All we know is that everything is alive otherwise it wouldn't be here - The rest is speculation, mental judgements of the reality of feeling good or bad, this or that, nobody knows the holy white truth because it is invisible - All the saints have gone to the grave with the same pout as the muderer or the hater, the dirt doesn't discriminate, it'll eat all lips no matter what they did and that's because nothing matters and we all know it - But what we gonna do? Pretty soon there will be a new kind of murderer, who will kill without any reason at all, just to prove that it doesn't matter, and his accomplishments will be worth no more and no less than Beethoven's last quarters and Boito's requiem - Churches will fall, Mongolian hordes will piss on a map of the West..."
And, "For those who believe in a personal God who cares about good and bad are hallucinating themselves beyond the shadow of a doubt..." Jack Kerouac from Desolation Angels.

"If you've no imagination, dying doesn't matter much. If you have, it's too much.....Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die." Louis Ferdinand Celine from Journey to the End of the Night.

"This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse..." Henry Miller from Tropic of Cancer.


"...he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown." And, "To such men [artists & thinkers] the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature. To them, too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to immortality." Hermann Hesse from Steppenwolf.


"Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable. Man has all but lost his ability to accommodate himself to personal extinction; he must now proceed to physically overcome it. In short, to kill death: to put an end to his own mortality as a certain consequence of being born." Alan Harrington from The Immortalist.

Answer 3

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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

Answer 4

Henry James
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.
Henry James’s nephew, the son of William James, once asked the great and thoughtful novelist what he ought to do with his life, how he ought live it. The nephew received this advice: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”

Answer 5

"Curiouser and curiouser" from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
"The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley..." from Robert Burns's "To a Mouse."
"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant: An elephant's faithful one hundred percent." from Dr. Seuss's "Horton Hatches an Egg."

Answer 6

"To begin with" he said heavily , "you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom , an image of the Great Gull , and your whole body , from wingtip to eingtip , is nothing more than your thought itself "

Richard Bach in "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"

Answer 7

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Groucho

Answer 8

''Δεν φοβάμαι τίποτα,
Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα,
Είμαι ελεύθερος''
a saying by the Greek author Nikolaos Kazantzakis

and it means:
I am not afraid of anything,
I don't hope of anything,
I am Free!

Answer 9

"I feel infinite" by Charlie in the Perks of Being a Wallflower

Answer 10

end of harry potter book (i know, lame, but it's true!): "what comes will come, and we'll have to meet it when it does." everyday i feel like this, that my future is inevitable, so i have to stop worrying about it and just meet it already.

Answer 11

Out, Out Damn Spot! (Macbeth)