What is your favorite line in fiction?

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“Go ahead …make my day”…Dirty Harry

" I’ll be back"…“Get out”…The Terminator

“That’s not a knife…this is a knife”…Crocodile Dundee
 
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” - King Lear

“Reader, I married him.” - Jane Eyre

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” - 1984
 
“You can’t handle the truth!”

-Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men
 
“But life – life – how was one to do without that?”

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
 
“Once upon a time there were four little puppies. Their names were Wags, Tags, Rags, and Obadiah.”

— Four Little Puppies, Harry Whittier Frees

Apparently Chris Nolan is tapped to direct the movie version, but is at loggerheads with Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay, and with Peter Fonda, who wants to play the iconic “Tags” role, but as an embittered former Special Forces IED detection dog who was missing in action in Afghanistan for 5 years before being rescued.
 
SolicitorPirate said:
Not really a quote, but there’s a dialogue that occurs in Terry Pratchet’s Hogfather that always resonated with me:

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.
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That is one of intresting ideas he brings up. Though I must admit one of my favorite lines from that book is when Death is at the mall with Corporal Nobbs in his lap.
“Hello little boy, er human, er… being.”

“Mom, Dad, there’s a dinosaur in the backyard.” -Jurrasic Park II

“Comb the desert!” -Space Balls
 
‘‘I wear the chain I forged in life. I wear it link by link, and yard by yard.’’

said The Ghost of Christmas Past in Charles Dickens’ ‘‘A Christmas Carol’’
 
“Comb the desert!” -Space Balls
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So lines from films are ok?

Ok then, from that film,

“What’s the matter Colonel Sanders? Chicken???”
 
I don’t have a single line, but the movie I think has the most quotable lines is “Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade”

“Sallah! I said NO camels! That’s FIVE camels! Can’t you count?!”

“I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne.”

“You call THIS archaeology?!”

“Attila? The Professor? He was never giddy, even when he WAS a schoolboy.”

“What about the boat? We’re not going on the boat?”

“<Slap!> That’s for blasphemy!”

“I’m as human as the next man.” “I WAS the next man!”

“We named the DOG Indiana!”

“Water? No, thank you. Fish make love in it.”
 
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased… . ."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
 
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” A.S. Solzhenitsyn “Gulag Archipelago”

“A stukach (betrayer) is like a ferryman. Once he gets you where you want to go, you don’t need him anymore.” Solzhenitsyn “Gulag Archipelago”

And who could possibly not like: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” Rhett Butler “Gone with the Wind”.

But my absolute favorite is:

“The policeman stands lightly in the present moment, at the same time both committed and detached, like a true Christian or a philosopher of old, who knows this world to be no home, but a wilderness.” John Gardener “Sunlight Dialogues”.
 
Deserves it? I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.

-Gandalf the Grey talking to Frodo in the Mines of Moria
The Lord of the Rings
 
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. {H. G. Wells: The Time Machine}

Badges, we don’t need no stinkin’ badges. {Blazing Saddles}
 
From film:

“You’re the reason cave men chiseled on walls.” As Good as it Gets.
 
From television:

“There is more to leadership than being a jerk!”

“Just because it is ‘inexplicted’ doesn’t make it inexplicable.”

----House M.D.
 
Best opening line to a book ever:

The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.
 
“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
 
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