Is there a line from a book that "gets you every time?"?

The Ending of Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

It’s very profound. The book was about how people cannot get over the past and are therefore haunted by it.

“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” from Tuesdays With Morrie

Oh, and of course… almost anything from Dr. Seuss. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.” from Oh! The Places You’ll Go ;)

Sophomoric? sure. Pretentious? probably. A little too zany? absolutely – but it’s still frickin’ awesomeness: The opening of T.A.Z.

—-
CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.

…

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
—-

The [Poetic Terrorism] section later on directly inspired Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and many other things. Very sassy. There is nothing like it.

Definitely mondo form. “The whole world can tell a snake from a dragon, but you cannot fool a Zen monk.” – Principia Discordia

“From hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale.” From…......well you know where it’s from, I know you do.

“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The absurd futility of life’s endeavors is epitomized in this last line, when, quite by accident, in the novel’s last couple of pages, the protagonist happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers. I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.”
-Fight Club

“Deal with honor, sleep at night.” One of Dick francis’ books, don’t remember which.

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka, The Trial

”...Good-night, my – ” He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.
—Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

Nothing like a good literary romance to make you feel all warm and snuggly inside (possibly, if not probably, coupled with a feeling of loneliness and desperation).

Vous êtes belles, mais vous êtes vides…. On ne peut pas mourir pour vous.

While I was in the hospital laboring for my son, my husband brought “Around the World in 80 Days” and read it aloud to me – the whole book.

The last lines brought me to tears.

Phileas Fogg had won his wager, and had made his journey around the world in eighty days. To do this he had employed every means of conveyance—steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, trading-vessels, sledges, elephants. The eccentric gentleman had throughout displayed all his marvellous qualities of coolness and exactitude. But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?

Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!

Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?

***
When I was younger, there was a line from a Poe poem “A Dream Within A Dream” that would go through my mind whenever I felt like the class outcast (well, when the feeling was particularly prominent).

”...I could not awaken / My heart to joy at the same tone / And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone”

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I don’t agree entirely with Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but this book holds some deep truths that inspire me to succeed.

Mines really from a moive though (maby the book i never read it though :P)
Bormier “They have a cave troll”
LOTR the fellow ship of the ring

I don’t have any specific lines,but much of what Mark Twain wrote “gets me” :)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

William Wordsworth
Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

@MacBean Way to break my heart this morning. Just about every line of that book weighs heavy in my heart. That’s why I maintain the belief that it is the single greatest book ever written.

“Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c’est qu’il cache un puits quelque part…” – is one of the lines from Le Petit Prince that always got to me.

And though I hesitate to put this quotation from The Book Thief into context (because everyone should go read it for themselves!) this one has haunted me since the first time I read it: “From a Himmel Street window, the stars set fire to my eyes.”

@TheOnlyNeffie My favourite line from Seuss is “It’s opener there in the wide open air.” :)

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett

“She was a viable die-able age.” from the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

I’m actually not much into poetry, and yet the first three quotes that pop into my head are from poems. They were all published in books, so I’ll post anyway!

”’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
Because the spell check hates it, and yet I understand it perfectly.

“The world is too much with us, late and soon”
I’d like that etched on a glass vessel, my ashes placed inside, and have it cast adrift from Hawaii when I die.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”
Because it is ominous by the fifth word, and only gets heavier and heavier.

@tranquilsea

Excellent post! Can be fully appreciated without any context.

Like a lot of other people, the book On The Road by Jack Kerouac had a profound influence on me…

The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.

And…

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move.

On The Road helped me realize that contentment is not necessarily a good thing, and for me, a bad thing.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky ws full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

@filmfann Lurve. Great freakin’ book.

@Seek_Kolinahr The Poe poem you’re quoting is “Alone,” not “A Dream Within a Dream.”

@muppetish When I read this question, about six quotes from Le petit prince popped into mind, including the one you shared. It took me a long time to pick just one.

We are men of action, lies do not become us. – The Princess Bride

@ibstubro Thank you. I love it because of its simplicity and profound truth.

•“Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east.”
– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 19

Great answers, everyone. Thank you. Sorry for the delayed response. Lurve all around!

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard

Life happens. Now get in there and post…there are some outstanding answers!

It doesn’t give me goosebumps, but one line, among so many others in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, always seems to get to me.

In the part where this is said, some dudes are talking about a young man who may or may not have the HIV virus, and one guy tells everyone how he told him that even if he has it, it doesn’t spell the end. That you can still live your life, go on and all that, it’s not an automatic death sentence…many people do this, live life to the fullest even with the virus.

Then, Mark Renton, the protagonist, says…It’s easy to get all philosophical when you’re not the one with shit for blood. I believe this is also said in the movie.

“You stick your head above the crowd and attract attention, and sometime, maybe somebody, will throw a rock at you. That’s the territory. You buy the land, you get the Indians.” -Crazy From the Heat, DLR

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” – Doug Adams, one of the Hitchiker’s books

“You can never have too many knives.” – Logan from The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

I have been wracking my brain trying to find the exact Sue Grafton book this came from, but I’m stumped. Not terribly insightful or deep, just a phrase that has always tickled my fancy:

“The false eyelash lay alone in its case, like a wink.”

Since I can’t remember the title of the book, I also don’t trust my recollection of the line. I’m certain I’ve got the gist of it right, if not the exact wording.

@MacBean

I don’t think I could be any more embarrassed right now. You are absolutely right.

This is literally the equivalent of me giving a public speech and realizing I’m naked.

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. The is no place like home.” from Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz always reminds me how lucky I am to have such a warm, loving environment at home.

@sibbyr

Honestly, I do appreciate the sentiment. However the places that I would trade house and home to live number in the thousands if not the tens of thousands. And that might just be in this country.

There is a line from “A Christmas Carol”, when Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, and he asks the ghost if little Timmy will die, the ghost replies “And they better do it now, and decrease the surplus population”, a past reference to Scrooge’s earlier comments about the hardship children faced in Victorian workhouses. One can’t help but feel the heartstring being tugged at when you read that line.

”...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Only part of the line, but it’s one of my favorite parts, and the entire line is, of course, 45 pages long.

“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

This line to me is perfection.

“And I say to Sam now: ‘Sam-here’s the book.’ It’s so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?”

I can see this in my head so well that it scares me.

@boots, what are those from?

Ah crap, I forgot to attribute them…

They’re both from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

@boots, ah, I still need to read that. Thanks.

@boots “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” If heaven exists, it must be just like that. Thanks for sharing it with us.

And a simple one from Slaughterhouse Five that I often feel: “I have become unstuck in time.”