What is your favorite quote from a book?

The End

That's like asking me my favourite atom in a bowl of ice cream. Too many to choose. But (if we can include plays) some are:

What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams. (from "La vida es sueño")

The whole run-on passage of Remedios the Beauty being taken into the heavens and also the destruction of Macondo in the final page of One Hundred Years of Solitude (the most beautiful book I will ever read).

For speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen; for scientific discovery, give me Scott; but when all hope is lost, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton. (from "The Worst Journey in the World", by Cherry-Garrard, himself a polar explorer).

The killing of the teacher in Stephen King's banned novel "Rage".

And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
("Twelfth Night", by Billy Shakespeare)

Pretty much all of Catcher in the Rye. The whole thing.

No one has lived longer than a dead child, and P'eng-tsu died young. Heaven and earth are as old as I, and the ten thousand things are as one. (from the writings of Chuang Tzu, which I wouldn't know about if not for Carl Sagan).

Nearly all Vonnegut. I miss him like I'm going to miss Márquez. Compliment to both, there.

Finally, this:

He sent himself to her across moraine and ice-cap, traversing the implacable, granite crests of the black deep, passing by sailors and seals, the lonely and the lost, impregnating her without touching her, making life where there was none, leaving before he had arrived. He would never know that she wept for a hundred and ninety-eight days before the yielding of a life unwanted due to the mystery of the siring. Small and bruised, with emerald eyes that disturbed relatives, the baby saw through people and beyond their time, settling easily into the company of ghosts and shadows, the men and trees no longer seen on this world. In this way, he communed with a colourless voice in the icy desolation, the father who had wanted only the idea of him. He sensed without doubt the cool heart that had called him into being and made no special effort to catch at the sleeve disappearing amid the bustle of awkward silence, heading away into the unending caverns of memory's luminous tableaux, aching for the peace of a death unknown.

This post just makes me wish I read more, or remembered passages from books I have read :/ don't make me feel inadequate, IIN!

Too many. I'll give one from the book I'm currently reading, which happens to also be one of my favourites:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Ahhh, Fitzgerald, your words do strange things to me. Beautiful. I'm reading the Great Gatsby for the 8th time now, but I must have read that quote at least 100 times. I absolutely love it. It gets me every time.

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(White Nights)
“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.” Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

(Not sure if this is straight from the book or quoted in it) "We should never have come here, with flesh so soft and hearts so unwise."
~James O'Barr, The Crow

"If you ride hard and fast enough into the west, the sun will never set for you."
~R.A. Salvatore, The Dark Elf Trilougy (Montolio)

"I think I understand. Shake a person up enough and what they thought was a personality starts to separate. We can be anything."
~Kill Your Boyfriend

"Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness... and love. Books loved anyone who opened them. They gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return, they never went away, never."
~Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

"It does not do to rely on silent majorities, for silence is a fragile thing. One loud noise and it's gone."
~V for Vendetta

""Everyone must leave something behind him when he dies... something your hand touched in some way, so your soul has a place to go when you die, and when people look... you're there. IT doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hand away."

~Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

"Why? Because pride is a strange thing, and generosity deserves generosity in return. But mostly because it felt like the right thing to do, and that is reason enough."
~Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

No way in hell I could choose just one, this list was kinda tough as is.

"Romans 12:14-16
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and curse not. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. 16 Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation."

"It is as if a man, wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, were to say to his surgeon: I will not have this arrow removed until I know who shot it, his caste, his height, his color, where he comes from; the kind of bow the arrow was shot from, the wood of which the shaft was made and the species of bird whose feathers adorn it. Verily, before these questions were settled, the man would have died."
From a book that I read about the philosophy of the Buddha.

There are a bunch more but these are the only ones that I have on my computer.

I cheated and grabbed the book off the shelf. I don't actually memorize passages from books. But this is from one of my favorites, their are many.

“This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.”

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.”
Knut Hamsun - Hunger

"Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy."

"I roam through life like a whore in a world without any sidewalk."

-Emil Cioran: The Trouble of Being Born

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
-Richard Dawkins

'When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?'

'When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.'

'Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.'

These are all Chuck Palahniuk quotes from the book 'Invisible Monsters'. I've got loads of others, but these are the ones I read last.

42

Ezio, walking down the street a few paces behind his wife and children, suddenly winced as a coughing fit took him. He leant against a wall for support.
In a moment Sophia was by his side.
'You should have stayed home.'
He smiled at her. 'I am home.'
'Sit down, here.' She indicated a nearby bench. 'Wait for us. We'll be right over there. Only take a minute or two.'
He nodded, watching her rejoin the children and wander off a little farther down the street. He made himself comfortable, letting the pain subside.
He watched the people walking to and fro, going about their daily business. He felt pleased, and enjoyed watching them. He breathed in the smells of the market as it broke up around him. He listened to the sounds the traders made.
'I love it here,' he said to himself. Home. Home at last.
His reverie was interrupted by the peevish voice of a young Italian who plumped himself down on the bench near him. The young man was talking, apparently, to himself. He didn't look at Ezio.
'Al diavolo! I hate ...

"I don't believe he was a bad person, I believe it was a bad time." - Everything is Illuminated

The line was about the anti-jewish acts in Ukraine during WW2 (more specifically about the narrator's grandfather) I feel like it can be related to so many things in both history and modern times.

It's not my all times favorite, but it's one I liked from a book I just read recently.

"I think in certain ways she's so much smarter than the rest of us, that she can't relate. In other ways she's not very intelligent, or mature, I should say. It might be a perception problem. Our perception problem. We expect her emotional abilities to match her intellect, but she's still a little girl."

The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelo

”The Universe conspires to help you”

"You're a wizard Harry" (joking...)

"One does not simply walk into mordor."

" this is my story, scar tissue and all". Amen Anthony keidis. And Corinthians 14:34 women are to remain silent. Seems legit

My favorite quote...

"I would not like them here or there.
I would not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them Sam I Am."

He goes through so many struggles in that book. It's so heart breaking.

I should probably read more fiction than what I do.

"I wanted to live in her body and melt in her bones-yeah, it was that kind of love". I always forget the name of that book, but I can definatly relate to the quote.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?