What is your favorite line in fiction?

[Viki63]

Aaargh! It’s far to lat to edit my post and I wish I could delete the above portion. I moved from prose fiction to poetry fiction and then, kept moving through favorite poetry lines forgetting the injunction that our lines must draw from fiction.

The world really is charged with the grandeur of God and I am so blessed to be able to see this.

My apologies for my earlier disoriented posting.
jt

There’s nothing wrong with including your favorite lines of poetry. Poetry helps keep us sane. Hopkins is one of my favorite poets too. I love these lines:

“Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

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[jeannetherese]

I so love that image of the Holy Ghost.

I bless the day sister Francis shared the delights of Hopkin’s poetry with us. An amazing teacher who dearly loved literature, who helped it become, for me, the gift of a lifetime.
:nun2:

Thank you for starting it Viki63.

 

[Joe_5859]

My favorite line in high school was from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”:

It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone. . . .

It’s a little depressing now that I think about it. Though, I do think there is an element of truth there.

 

[jeannetherese]

There’s some droll humour there, that sets me thinking: Mr. Death and Adam Smith have a lot in common-that tendency to link a higher value to a limited supply, coupled with high demand.

 

[mVitus]

“Honey, and I never thought I’d say this, be careful with the Bhuddist terrorist.”

From a Madam Secretary episode and said by the secreatary’s husband.

 

[ToeInTheWater]

The last lines of The Great Gatsby. Not even sure the whole “American Dream” term had been coined yet when it was written. Yet the ending seems to describe so well, both the glory and tragedy involved in it. (Perhaps non-Americans have similar concepts but the story strikes me as uniquely American.)

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

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.