What is your favourite literary quote and why?

Dr. Bad Touch

"The only true madness is loneliness,
the monotonous voice in the skull
that never stops
because never heard."

From John Montague's the wild dog rose. I don't even know why but the first time I read these lines it resonated hugely with me and has stuck ever since. A beautiful, tragic poem.

Einhard

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother

Henry V, 4, 3.

Sends a shiver down my spine, and the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up whenever I hear it. Written 500 years ago, and referring to martial valour, but I think it resonates even today, and in all situations where people are brought together and bond through a difficult shared experience.

I sing of arms and the man...

the Aeneid

Only 7 brief words, describing nothing of import in themselves, but I think they are hugely powerful. Like the first words of 1984, they immediately convey a sense of how the work will proceed, and set the mood of the reader.

Kiva.D

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." ~William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

Because I believe it.

aine100

This is a bit off topic but does anyone know what or where these lines come from? They were recited to me in a pub in Dublin when I was 17 and supposed to be seeing the Kremlin Gold on a school tour (circa 1992-1993) and I'd love to know what they are from. (snuck out from seeing the Gold and had a lovely time in a pub drinking pints of cider with my friend- I nearly missed the train home!!)

"Have you ever heard tell of the Moll in the moon, who for want of the thousand married stars would not make love to the clown and the sun, oh stupid lovely Moll in the Moon.. is it old you are getting instead of young?"
forgive me if I have got them wrong, it was a long time ago,
thanks

Manach

“Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

It echoes with a traditional sense of self reliance and reaching to be better.

marienbad

'I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

T.S Eliot -The Waste Land

I could have picked anyone of dozens but that one has always stuck with me for some reason .
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sadie06

By far my favourite is the closing paragraph of The Dead by James Joyce…it devastated me the first time I read it. As that is a rather clichéd choice, I will go with something that resonated with me personally at a particular moment in time.

From Ian McEwan's Atonement, as a mother notices her youngest child advancing towards adolescence.

'There was a time one would have received a bright and intricate response that would in turn have unfolded silly and weighty questions to which Emily gave her best answers, and while the meandering hypotheses they indulged were hard to recall in detail now, she knew she never spoke so well as she had to her eleven-year-old last-born. No dinner table, no shaded margin of a tennis court ever heard her so easily and richly associative. Now the demons of self-consciousness and talent had struck her daughter dumb, and though she was no less loving […] Emily mourned the passing of an age of eloquence. She would never again speak like that to anyone, and this was what it meant to want another child. She would soon be forty seven'.