Don't think we've had this before (tell me to shut up if we have): What's your favourite line from a novel?

Cath

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Mine is from Martin Amis' Dead Babies, but I have to find it first. Actually, it may be more of a few lines, than a line, or even a paragraph, but still....

A favourite line from a recent novel I read, The Elected Member by Bernice Reubens went something along these lines: My death will just be something that happened to my mother.

Don't know about favourite lines, but my No.1 opening sentence has to be Iain Banks' 'The Crow Road':

'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'

If my memory was up to the job, I'd think of lots more favourite lines. Oh hell. You might have prompted a lengthy trawl through the bookshelves...

Julie

I've remembered another. I love this image from the opening of William Gibson's Neuromancer:

The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

From Wodehouse: 'Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.'

From P&P (which I never said was chick lit:
'She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin.'

Emma

I was flipping through a notebook the other day and came across some bits I'd copied down - but I don't know WHO the author is - maybe someone will recognise this (maybe it's from Angela Carter???):

Pirate gold isn't a thing to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly.

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I've copied quite a bit from Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles in the same general vicinity of my notebook, so perhaps that's where it's from....

...One of my favourite all-time books is The Go Between by LP Hartley. I really love the (famous) first line:

'The past is a foreign country. They do things differntly there.'

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Hmm...they also do them differently!

This is from a Dean Koontz novel, but I can't remember which one, and this is from memory:

She swore like a brothel keeper specialising in sailors with Tourret's Syndrome.

Fantastic!

That's great. I love these one's, from my favourite favourite books:

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

A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.

Gandalf - LOTR

"I didn't know you could stop being a God."
"You can stop being anything."
Delirium and Dream conversating, in Brief Lives. Sandman.

"Our existence deforms the universe. That's responsibility." Delirium, The Kindly Ones. Sandman.

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in any case, the made - up things seem a good deal more important then the real ones.
Marsh-wiggle, The Silver Chair. Narnia.

From Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the Durbervilles"

If I remember correctly:

"He had the ability to work hard at times, but those times could not be relied upon to coincide with the hours of requirement."

Sounds like people I've worked with.

From Vonnegut's 'Sirens of Titan'

"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules -- and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."

and from his 'Deadeye Dick'

"This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."

From Vonnegut's 'Sirens of Titan'

"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules -- and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."

and from his 'Deadeye Dick'

"This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."

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oops - this mouse sometimes double-clicks when a click would have sufficed. Sorry. :(