What Are Some of Your Favorite Lines or Paragraphs? > Likes and Comments

I have so many favorites. I'll kick this off by sharing one from The Great Gatsby... "His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” I get chills it's so beautiful.

I’ve always loved the beginning of Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
“When shall we three meet again?”
“Well I can do next Tuesday”

One of my favorite quotes is from H.P. Lovecraft: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." It perfectly captures why I love diving into dark and mysterious stories!

Yes that definitely sums it up for me too!

A most recent favorite for me, 'If someone cracked me open, they'd find ink in my veins and stories in my soul.' Throne of Nightmares by Kerri Maniscalco

@Heather M Jones-Lancto - Love it! It describes how I feel about writing stories!

here's a personal of mine. from The Stormrage Protector. Wattpad:
"You'll be forced to learn from the streets; it can be hard. but accept no defeat, surrender or retreat."

many good ones. This just popped into my head.

From the end of "Lake Wobegon"......Has stayed with me for decades.....
."Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. ”

From The Book Thief. Death is the narrator! Here is what he says:

SOME FACTS ABOUT STALINGRAD 1. In 1942 and early ’43, in that city, the sky was bleached bedsheet-white each morning. 2. All day long, as I carried the souls across it, that sheet was splashed with blood, until it was full and bulging to the earth. 3. In the evening, it would be wrung out and bleached again, ready for the next dawn. 4. And that was when the fighting was only during the day.

And here is another one from The Book Thief.
Death is speaking again:

I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it’s cold. And I don’t have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I’ll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue.

@tammyjata the Book Thief has been in my Kindle Library and I keep saying I am going to read it next.....you are my encouragement to actually read it next!

“Where's Papa going with the ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. - Charlotte's Web E B White

Also I love this bit from one of E B White's letters (30 Sept 1938)
Tell your boss Mr. Saxton that I finally quit thinking about book titles when I arrived at one called “The Pop-Up Book for Sit-Down People.” Yrs. rhythmically, E. B. White.

Mr. White's letters are a gold mine of smiles. Previous letter closes...And to top it all, the Portland Press Herald printed a list of Who’s Who in Maine. There were only nine of us. (also September 38)

One of the books I identify with quite a bit : it is nobler and more beautiful to let oneself succumb to life itself than by one's own hand." — Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

The first line commands attention with an unknown person stating,
"Let's kill them all." —Damyanti Biswas, The Blue Monsoon

@tammyjata those are some great ones.

Too many to list! Here are a couple of my favorites from Watchmen:

Nite Owl: "What's happened to the American Dream?"
The Comedian: "It came true. You're lookin' at it."
_____
Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias: "I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one."

"The man in black 🐈‍⬛ fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed." Chapter 1, sentence 1 of The Gunslinger, Book 1 in Stephen King's incredible Gunslinger series. This first book is one of my favorites of all time

“You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.”
― Jonathan Carroll, Outside the Dog Museum

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

"Tell me... do you know how much a million memories weigh?

How about one?

It weighs enough to break a spine. It weighs enough to break a soul.

How much does a memory weigh?

Too much to carry alone."

- Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death and Dawn

Someone has to say it (and it truly is one of my most favorite opening lines from one of most favorite books): From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

And the opening lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun".

Trout Fishing in America - the weirdest book I ever loved:

"It’s sandwich time for the poor. Steel made from trout. I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon. The Kool-Aid Wino. You’re not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed. The birthmark looked just like an old car parked on his head. They were huge, slow-moving child-eyed rats. Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street. You had to be a plumber to fish that creek. And the dead didn’t mind me fishing there at all. The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves. His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord. He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so. Trout death by port wine. He looked like a young, skinny Adolf Hitler, but friendly. We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. HANDLE THIS WINO LIKE HE WAS AN ANGEL. Everything smelled of sheep on Paradise Creek, but there were no sheep in sight. It has been raining here now for two days, and through the trees, the heart stops beating. The trout in those telephone booths were good fellows. The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout. It is easy to say things about Stanley when you have never been there. Like astigmatism, I made myself at home. Instead of making her furry sound, she adapted rapidly to the difference between animals and fish, and was soon making a silver sound. How religious and intimate the goldfish and the gun looked together. They weren’t exactly the quietest body bringers in the world. The dog barked so loud that the bathroom was soon filled with dead people. Curses were music to their roots. Trout fishing on the Street of Eternity. The red dress did it all. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. We go into the house and begin that two-hour-yak-yak-activity we call breakfast. He bought that window at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. His mistresses became bird nests of wrinkles. USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE. We have our coffin-sized Christmas trees right over here, sir. Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise."

Matthew wrote: "Trout Fishing in America - the weirdest book I ever loved:

"It’s sandwich time for the poor. Steel made from trout. I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to be..."

That's all from one book? I couldn't understand a lick of ìt! 🤷😁

tbrhoarder-bookdragon wrote: ""Tell me... do you know how much a million memories weigh?

How about one?

It weighs enough to break a spine. It weighs enough to break a soul.

How much does a memory weigh?

Too much to carry al..."

Oh, that's beautiful 😍 thank you for sharing it! 😊

From a recent book, Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield:

She is silvered over, oystered at her elbow creases and around her neck. ~Miri

Leah--about her bright pale eyes and the shape of her mouth and the feeling when we spoke for the first time that there were vast places in the world that I had never yet thought to go. ~Miri

I did my best to keep my gaze away from the windows, thought of strange-shaped ocean creatures peering in at the three of us and smiling with all their teeth. ~ Leah

My heart is a thin thing, these days--a shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs. ~Miri

"Blood is made of sodium, potassium, and calcium -more or less the same as the seawater, etc. The first things came from the sea, so there's going to be a little trace of it in everything, a little trace of salt in the bones." ~Leah to Miri

I thought so many passages from this book were beautiful, but I especially liked this one, on the feeling of letting go of a fantasy love, from That Which Binds Us by Cathy Rigg (edited to remove a spoiler):

"Do you know what it is like to fully inflate your lungs? To lift your chest, and expand your torso, to breathe air in, in, in, in, until you have reached maximum capacity? You can hold it there only a moment, confident and satisfied and satiated, until minutely—almost imperceptibly—you realize the only choice available to you is let go. Release. And so you do. Slow, controlled, your body deflates until your muscles relax and there is simply no more. There is only empty. You have been emptied.

"So it was with me in the afterward of those confusing brandy moments. Years of waiting, wishing, hoping. I let it all go slowly. I relaxed back into myself, and with the man of my dreams sitting right there across from me, I regained normal breathing.

"It will not happen, I knew then, not with [this man]. Not even if he asks. Which, of course, he never will."

"Fools and flies I do despise but the more I know of fools the more I like the flies" from S.A Cosby My Darkest Prayer

ha ha ha from almost all graphic novels

'For the dead travel fast' Dracula will always be a favourite of mine. a x x

Mine's not from written work, but I love what Ted says on one episode of How I Met Your Mother:

(Paraphrasing)
If you're looking for the word that means caring about someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want no matter how much it destroys you, it's love!
And when you love someone, you don't stop, ever. Even when people roll their eyes or call you crazy. Even then. Especially then.
Because if I could take the whole world's advice, and move on, that wouldn't be love. That would be some other disposable thing, that's not worth fighting for.

"Sometimes in life, a sudden situation, a moment in time, alters your whole life, forever changes the road ahead."
Ahmad Ardalan

We can’t stop here, this is bat country!

Fear and loathing

My all time favorite: "For you, a thousand times over".
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I love this:
His arrogance was an affront: he pressed his knee against her leg and offered to provide her with a drink a little stronger than apple juice. “No, thank you. I’m not too sure I’ve inclination for anything stronger or faster,” she’d replied, and fixed an ever so exaggerated toothpaste smile to her face before answering her mother’s glare with dreamy contemplation heavenwards. An act discomfiting to the table.

The Roads Chosen, by Ben Carlyle.

Theres a few.
"Whatever exists in creation without my knowledge exists without my consent." - Blood Meridian

God help the, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates." - Moby Dick