What is your favorite line in literature?

[Dee Ernst]

Here's mine -

"Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

It's from To Kill A Mockingbird, of course.  It's not just the image that I love, it's also the rhythm of the words.  I recently saw a dramatization of the book, and I was worried until the actress on stage spoke this line, and spoke it just as I knew Scout would say it.  After hearing it, I relaxed, and the play was wonderful.

[mooshie78]

Hmmm, not sure I have a clear favorite.  But one that jumps out from a book I'm re-reading currently:

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." (The Great Gatsby)

Always liked the opening few lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as well.  

"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."

[MikeAngel]

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" by Huck Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here was the moral high point of this the great American novel.

[QuantumIguana]

Douglas Adams description of the destruction of the Earth:

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.

[nogdog~6op6ou]

The first thing that jumped to my mind is from Charles Stross's Halting State:

Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table.

If you aren't a bit of a geek/nerd, that might not be as funny to you as it was to me when I first read it.

I quite liked this one from one of my favorite reads of 2011, Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov:

The past believed in dates. And everyone’s life consisted of dates, giving life a rhythm and sense of gradation, as if from the eminence of a date one could look back and down, and see the past itself. A clear, comprehensible past, divided up into squares of events, lines of paths taken.

This is a lot more than a line, but I've always loved this bit from Roger Zelazny's The Gun's of Avalon:

It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.

[Mike McIntyre]

"The nighttime wrote a check that daylight couldn't cash."  Thomas McGuane — "Panama"

[Geemont]

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
 - V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

[rubymatthewserotica]

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" by Huck Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here was the moral high point of this the great American novel.

Love Huck Finn.  Am plowing through Twain's Autobiography as we speak. 

[jljarvis]

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
–George Eliot, Middlemarch

[Ryan Harvey]

Mine is from The Haunting of Hill House, the concluding sentence of what I think is the best opening paragraph from any book I've read

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

This was one of the times when reading a book that I realized for certain I would love it just from the first paragraph.

[StephenLivingston]

Tough question.  There are so many great lines to choose from but the one that springs to mind most is:

“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 judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

Spoken by Gandalf to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.  Written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Best wishes, Stephen Livingston.

[Tony Richards]

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.

                                                 Raymond Chandler's debut novel -- 'The Big Sleep'

[Tony Richards]

"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't **** with us."

                                                 Chuck Palahniuk -- Fight Club

[Tony Rabig]

I don't think I could possibly narrow it down either.  The opening of Gatsby has already been quoted.  But the closing of Gatsby is just as strong:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

[mooshie78]

I don't think I could possibly narrow it down either.  The opening of Gatsby has already been quoted.  But the closing of Gatsby is just as strong:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Agreed.  One of the best endings to any book IMO.

Another great line from near the end of the book:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

[4eyesbooks]

I have to go with a local Atlanta author 

“Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” –Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

[SusanKL]

"The last camel died at noon."    
It's the FIRST line in Ken Follet's novel "Key to Rebecca."

[Ryan Harvey]

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.

                                                 Raymond Chandler's debut novel -- 'The Big Sleep'

That's a close one for me too. Also love Marlowe's final speech to "Señor Maioranos" at the conclusion of The Long Goodye: "I won't say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final."

[JohnCStipa]

I always come back to Melville: "...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last beath at thee." Nothing quite like it has ever captured the essence of a character.

[Beth Dolgner]

"Not all those who wander are lost."
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

I love this quote so much that I wear a bracelet inscribed with it. As a freelance writer, I think it's an apt description of my career. 

[grahampowell]

From One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, after we learn that Ivan spent 3,653 days in the gulag:

"The three extra days were for leap years."

Doesn't sound like much, but coming at the end of the novel it reinforces that the State took everything away from you.



Graham

[Nick Steckel]

My favorite from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds: "And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

[FrankZubek]

"After wishing a whole company into existence, Rub would settle for a forty-hour-a-week job at union scale, as if he feared some sort of cosmic retaliation for an arrogant imagination."

From "Nobody's Fool" (1993) by Richard Russo
This line is on page 81 where Sully's friend, Rub, plays a wishing game to pass the time. And there is a whole two paragraph sequence involved here that begins on page 80 but that's a favorite line of mine from the book

The whole first half of the book is so rich in humor

In fact I wish Russo would hurry up and release another book. I had heard he was working on a sequel to this very book.

[Candee15]

"The nighttime wrote a check that daylight couldn't cash."  Thomas McGuane — "Panama"

Wow.  That is soooooo powerful.  Thank you for sharing!!!

[Kim Sheard]

The one that always comes to mind and makes me shake my head is:

Mother, he hath slain me.

from Macbeth But that is mostly because it is practically the only line the poor kid has and it is so brutally unnecessary! I have to love Shakespeare for putting it in there at all.

Though that doesn't have the meaning that some of the previous ones does.... will have to think about that kind of a line....