Evocative Literary Lines II

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words-blog2A few of literature’s memorable and thought provoking sentences:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943)

“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

What lines in literature do you know to be unforgettable?
Please share a line or two that has impacted you?

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29 thoughts on “Evocative Literary Lines II”

  3. I don’t think there can ever be a better opening than Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” — “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

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  4. “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” George Eliot, Adam Bede

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  5. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn…” Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell ? I find it to be an enduring piece of wisdom, akin to “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” Rather liberating.

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  6. Bach of Allusions: “We tend to teach best what we most need to learn.”

    My favorite of course: Melville: Ahab

    “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad – Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and – Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. (37.4)”

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  7. Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
    far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
    Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
    many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
    struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
    Homer, Odyssey

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