We asked members of the idealist Community to tell us about their favorite lines from literature. Here are some of their most beautiful replies. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
2.“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
3. “The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
4. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.”
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
6. “Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
—Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
7. “In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
8. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
10. “‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’”
—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
11. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
—J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
12. “A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
14. “As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared.”
—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
15. “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”
—W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”
16. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
18. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
19. “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
—Allen Ginsburg, “America”
20. “It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
—W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
22. “At the still point, there the dance is.”
—T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
23. “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
—Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
24. “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
—Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
26. “The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
27. “How wild it was, to let it be.”
—Cheryl Strayed, Wild
28. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
30. “She was lost in her longing to understand.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
31. “She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
—Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”
32. “We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”
—Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead
34. “The half life of love is forever.”
—Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
35. “I sing myself and celebrate myself.”
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
36. “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
—Bram Stroker, Dracula
37. “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
—L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
38. “I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
—Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
39. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
—Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
http://idealist4ever.com/50-beautiful-sentences-literature/
