# What are the best lines you've ever read?



## oksana (Feb 25, 2005)

Are there any lines from books that just haunted you for days after reading them? Please share them.


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## []V[]ACE (Feb 25, 2005)

The Gunslinger! By Stephen King. The ending of the part where Roland and The Darkman meet and The Man in Black tells of him The Dark Tower and his masters. Especially the part where he talks of the whole universe possibly being a tiny molecule in a blade of grass on another world. It made me consider a lot of philosophy and life itself.


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## demonic_harmonic (Feb 26, 2005)

dude! dark tower junkie represent!!!


but i didnt like the last three.


anyway, ALOT from a series of unfortunate events. i know its a kids' book series, but they get crazy.


i dont think i can actually type some here. its like, illegal i think.


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## thehappyhobo (Feb 27, 2005)

Catcher in the Rye-"I always think the girls I'm neckin' are so intelligent..."
That whole bit. I just came out of a farcical infatuation at the time so it kinda struck a chord.


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## Ham (Feb 28, 2005)

If there's a Top 100 Best Lines list filed away in my head someplace, about 90 of them are courtesy of Oscar Wilde.  The rest are Douglas Adams.


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## oksana (Mar 1, 2005)

Hm..yes, it may be illegal. I hadn't though of that. But if you quote just one line, I think it's okay. After all, some websites have lists of best first lines of a novel.

Yes, Oscar Wilde would definately have claim about 90% of good lines. I wonder if there is a list like that somewhere.


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## Aislynne (Mar 1, 2005)

I was reading a book by Deepak Chopra and I have two lines I figured I could share here.

"The wisdom inside you is like a spark that once lit can never be extinguished."

And...

"Being alive means winning the right to say anything you want, to be who you want to be, and to do what you want to do."

For now that's all I can think of.


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## Heid (Mar 16, 2005)

There was one line in Terry Pratchett's 'The Light Fantastic' that made me laugh out loud:

"They say curiosity killed the cat. However, Herena's curiosity could've masacred a pride of lions"


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## Saponification (Mar 16, 2005)

A lot of lines by Chuck Palahniuk and Terry Pratchett.


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## Hodge (Mar 17, 2005)

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions."

—_Catch–22_


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## crystalized-breath (Apr 25, 2005)

i've just read lolita, so a lot of lines from that - but the one that sticks out the most is:
_I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art._


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## Manx (Apr 26, 2005)

For some reason this quote struck me as true and stuck in my head since reading the book:

'An English gentleman never polishes his shoes, but then nor does a lazy bastard.' - From '_Dorian_' by Will Self.


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## bobothegoat (Apr 26, 2005)

The line from _Catcher in the Rye_ about how, when he died, his tombstone would have his name and when he died and then right under that someone would write, "F--- you."


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## horrorcrafter (Apr 27, 2005)

"Then terror came."   H.P.Lovecraft, "The Hound" 1934.


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## JustinCarter (May 4, 2005)

The line that stuck with me, and will forever is 

"Go, then; there are other worlds than these."

Stated by Jake in the first of the Dark Tower series.


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## daniela (May 4, 2005)

This is a bit long, so please bear with me for a minute.

"Ever since this morning, when over the obstacle of his belly he had had to roll his socks inch by inch up over his sweaty feet, he had smelled death.  It was no longer his own stench, which had so often substituted for the company he lacked, not the foul odor whose essence remained on his fingertips after he had clipped his toenails, not the aroma of his own farts, which he liked best to sniff from under the bedcovers or inhale from the bubbles rising in his bathwater, and most certainly not the fetor like old vase water that was his own breath, or the delicate bitterness of his sweat when he scratched his back.  What Florian Müller-Fritsch now smelled had finality."

-Story 20 from _33 Moments of Happiness:  St. Petersburg Stories_ by Ingo Schulze, English translation by John E. Wood.

--DM--


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## evadri (May 5, 2005)

There is one from Lord of the Rings:

'I go to find the sun!'

Legolas says it when they are trapped in the snow. It just struck me as having so much hope enclosed in that one statement - it's kind of my motto now: 'I condemn fear and trust to hope. I go to find the sun!'


And also this one from Jane Eyre caught my imagination for some reason:

"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,--you'd forget me." 

I guess I found it wonderfully romantic.


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## Pawn (May 5, 2005)

Interesting thread, with lots of great lines already mentioned. I'm going to bend the rules a little and throw one in for the poets among us:

"You don't need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don't even listen, simply wait.
Don't even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstacy at your feet."

- Kafka


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## Spudley (May 5, 2005)

Best lines ever....

Ford: "We're safe. We're in the cargo hold of the Vogon spaceship."
Arthur: "Ah. This must be some new definition of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of."

[Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy]


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## LostCause (May 5, 2005)

"Hell isn't a place.  It's a state of mind.  An obsession; with a voice and a face.  My Hell was Christine."

Erik from Susan Kay's novel Phantom


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## evadri (May 5, 2005)

As a huge Phantom fan, I now have to read that book. Thanks a lot LostCause!

Here's one from the original. It's about Raoul and it makes me laugh:

'She had passed without answering his cry...And he was thinking of dying; and he was twenty years old!'


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## Vos (May 29, 2005)

There are many quotes from novels that stand out to me. Unfortuneitly for me though, I cannot remember any of them  . The only I can think of right now is this...

"Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made consious of them..." H.P Lovecraft, The Tomb

oh and

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." William Gibson, Neuromancer

I just really like that metaphor (if you can call it that) for some reason  .


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## LoneWolf (May 29, 2005)

"Hard spikes of cold rain nailed the night to the city."--Door to December

One of my favorite lines from a Dean Koontz book. I can't remember anymore though.


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## a15haddad (Jun 10, 2005)

I've read Susan Kay's novel of Phantom of the Opera..  I thought the first three parts were stellar... but the rest was average, and I didn't think she did such a good job with Christine.  

"The horror!  The horror!" -Colonel Kurtz, Heart of Darkness

Everything O'Brien says during the torture sequence of 1984 is fantastic, as is the book.  I do remember laughing at, "We will abolish the orgasm."  The whole thing about what is one's mind is truth, that there is no concrete existence, etc. etc. was insanely deep.


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## Kelhanion (Jun 11, 2005)

There can be only one. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."


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## strangedaze (Jun 11, 2005)

Hubert Selby Jr, first line of Req. for a Dream:

'Harry locked his mother in the closet.'


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## waylander (Jun 11, 2005)

From _Lullaby_, by Chuck Palahniuk :

Maybe humans are just  the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

There are so many in Chuck's books....!


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## desired_destiny (Jun 14, 2005)

I really like this line from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Kidd:

"You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backward."


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## Kikster (Jun 16, 2005)

I love this one:

"you don't need to know that I'm telling myself to stay when I feel like leaving. because leaving is easy, and staying takes work. but in the mids of the work, I might lose some of my fear."

it's from "Girls' poker night" by jill a. davis. great book, I recommend it.


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## Mada (Jun 16, 2005)

from Predator: Cold War  (ill explain what was going on before the line)
One of the main characters, who was a detective, was making a drug bust in NYC when everything went wrong an a melee started.  The detective grabbed a pan filled with drugs and hit the attacker on the head, knocking him out, then said,
"That's drugs on your brain.  Or your brain on drugs, whatever."


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## Ralizah (Jun 16, 2005)

"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision." - Howard Roark from The Fountainhead

 That's just such a beautiful line.


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## a15haddad (Jul 4, 2005)

"We'll outwit that bastard (God) as we've outwitted many before." -Amerigo Bonasera, The Godfather

In the context it was in (Consigliere dying and begging Vito to save him from death and defeat God's will), it was one of the most powerful lines I have ever come across.


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## a15haddad (Jul 4, 2005)

"We'll outwit that bastard (God) as we've outwitted many before." -Amerigo Bonasera, The Godfather

In the context it was in (Consigliere dying and begging Vito to save him from death and defeat God's will), it was one of the most powerful lines I have ever come across.  No matter how powerful Vito is, he cannot stop death and is nothing in the face of God.


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## noahtgreat (Jul 26, 2005)

Not quite of the same classical calibur as Lovecraft or Hemmingway, but a line that always stuck with me, and in some ways informed so much of the writing I've done since reading it:



			
				Alex Garland said:
			
		

> The Beach[/u]]I leaned over and kissed Francoise.  She pulled away, or laughed, or shook her head, or closed her eyes and kissed me back.  Etienne woke, clasping his mouth in disbelief.  Etienne slept.  I slept while Francoise kissed Etienne.
> 
> Light-years above our garbage bag beds and the steady rush of the surf, all these things happened.



Something about the possibilities of every moment stretching off into the infinite stars above just really gets to me.


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## a15haddad (Jul 26, 2005)

I shall now list a bevy of my favorite lines in no particular order.

         Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

"The horror!  The horror!" 

"It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head.  But nothing happened.  The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.  Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due?  Hadn't he said he wanted only justice?  But I couldn't.  I could not tell her.  It would have been too dark- too dark altogether..."

Here is perhaps my favorite of all-time... more prose than a line, but whatever.

"Destiny.  My destiny!  Droll thing life is- that mysterious arrangement os merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself- that comes too late- a crop of unextinguishable regrets.  I have wrestled with death.  It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.  It takes place in an impalpable greyness with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.  If such is the form of ultimate wisdom then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.  I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have not hing to say.  This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man.  He had something to say.  He said it.  Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare that could not see the flame of the candle but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.  HE had summed up- he had judged.  'The horror!'  He was a remarkable man.  After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vigrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth- the strange commingling of deire and hate."

I don't remember exact wordage from 1984 and am too lazy to look, but the entire exchange between Winston and O'Brien in Room 101 was my favorite part of the book.  Also...

"It was a good hanging," Syme said wistfully.  "I think it ruins it when they tie their feet together.  I like to see them kicking."

From the Telltale Heart.

"You fancy me mad!  But madman know nothing..."

I'm too lazy to say some of my other favorites.


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## The Lone Prospector (Jul 27, 2005)

*lines*

I remember how pleasantly shocked I was upon reading James Joyce write of the Dead Sea as "the grey sunken cunt of the world" in "Telemachus" of Ulysses. I thought to myself "He's being erudite but somewhat perverted...my kind of writer!"


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## Avarice (Aug 2, 2005)

I think my mask of sanity is about to slip. - American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis.


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