I asked friends and people across the internet what they thought the most beautiful lines in literature were. Some chose lines from classic books while others picked more recent releases. Here are some of their answers.
23 Of The Most Beautiful Lines From Literature:
1.“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”
– Stephen Chbosky, Perks Of Being A Wallflower
2.“I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.”
– John Green, Looking For Alaska
3.“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.”
– E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
4.“Rudy, please, wake up, Goddamn it, wake up, I love you. Come on, Rudy, come on, Jesse Owens, don’t you know I love you, wake up, wake up, wake up…”
– Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
5.“I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.”
– Ian McEwan, Atonement
6.“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
– Jack Kerouac, On The Road
7.“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and gives them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
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8.“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
9.“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
10.“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, a very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander
11.“You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.”
– Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
12.“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart, even more, your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.”
– Jane Austen, Persuasion
13.“I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In The Time Of Cholera
14.“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”
– A.A. Milne, Winnie The Pooh
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15.The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”
—Arthur Golden, Memoirs Of A Geisha
16.Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
17.Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.”
– Anne Frank, The Diary Of Anne Frank
18.“There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
– John Green, The Fault In Our Stars
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19.Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
20.I don’t have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.”
– Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology Of Water
21.If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
– Factotum, Charles Bukowksi
22.Writers don’t make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don’t work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck’s book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man’s stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.”
– Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
23.I let it go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”
– Five Quarters Of The Orange, Joanne Harris
Do you know ow of any more beautiful lines from literature? Leave a comment below.
Written by Koty Neelis. Read more of her blogs here at Thought Catalog
This article was originally published on Thought Catalog, View original article here.
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