What's your favourite book quote?

Question

"... so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

Wuthering Heights-Catherine confesses her love for Heathcliff.

Answer 1

"Fetch me my longsword, ho!"

-Romeo and Juliet

(oops, guess that's not typically a book, but just say the quote a few times. it's fun!)

Answer 2

I have two:

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
_The Bridge of San Luis Rey_ by Thornton Wilder

"[S]now was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
_Dubliners_, "The Dead" by James Joyce

Answer 3

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

First paragraph of Dickens A Christmas Carol

Answer 4

"Confucius say, 'the third glass of wine drinks the man,'" from the 1951 novel by Barrett, The Left Hand of God. I forget the characters, but in the movie I think it was Lee J Cobb to Humphrey Bogart, of vice-versa.

I've been fortunate to remember this advice from time to time.

Answer 5

"bringing the master of the city as back up is like taking a nuclear device to an ant hill"

Laurell K Hamilton
its from one of the first Anita Blake books

Answer 6

This is one of my new favorites from Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos, when the main character realizes she is in love:

"This person, I said to myself, this one person, of course, of course, of course. The words became my breathing and my pulse, the whole world reverberated with them. “Of course” I didn’t think the words “I love you” so obvious were they, so given, thinking them would have been sheer superfluity. But I did love him. I was in love with him. I would always be in love with him. Of course, I was. Of course, I am . Of course. So you see that I didn’t fall in love with him. Falling is a process and what happened to me wasn’t process. It wasn’t sequential or gradual. It wasn’t falling. A sea change. Transubstantiation. One minute, I was a woman not in love with him and the next minute, I was a woman in love with him. Bones, blood, skin, every cell changed over into something new."

Answer 7

"You are who you've always been, you just know it now, is all." From Stalking Darkness by Lynn Flewelling, where Alec discovers that his mother wasn't human and he's inherited a lifespan of 300-400 years from her side of the family.

Answer 8

One old drunkard up in central park,
A lion hunter in the jungle dark,
A chineese dentist
and a British queen
All fit together in the same machine...
Nice, nice,
very nice..
Nice, nice, very nice
so many different people in the same device............

Kurt Vonnegut jr.
Cat's Cradle

Answer 9

No good deed goes unpunished. Wicked.

I heard this quote before reading Wicked, but don't remember where.

Answer 10

"Bayushi Shoujo strode across the battlefield, looking for something to kill."
Best opening line ever.
--From "The Scorpion", in the Legend of the Five Rings series.