“At the still point, there the dance is.” —T. S. Eliot
posted on Dec. 9, 2014, at 12:46 p.m.
We asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about their favorite lines from literature. Here are some of their most beautiful replies.
Suggested by CindyH11 Creative Commons / Flickr: 58621196@N05
2. “In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Suggested by Jasmin B., via Facebook
3. “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”
Suggested by mollyp49cf70741
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
Suggested by Brooke K., via Facebook
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6. “Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
—Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Suggested by Danielle O., via Facebook
7. “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
Suggested by Kellie C., via Facebook
8. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Suggested by amandae16
Suggested by klavdijak22 Creative Commons / Flickr: rayseinefotos
10. “‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’”
—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Suggested by Shanna B., via Facebook
11. “The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Suggested by Therese K., via Facebook
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
Suggested by amykartzmanr
Suggested by natyjira Creative Commons / Flickr: junevre
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
Suggested by Alyssa P., via Facebook
15. “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”
—W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”
Suggested by Blake M., via Facebook
16. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Suggested by Missy W., via Facebook
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18. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Suggested by Emily F., via Facebook
19. “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
—Allen Ginsburg, “America”
Suggested by Jimmy C., via Facebook
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
Suggested by fireworkshurricanes
Suggested by amk93. Creative Commons / Flickr: chrisjl
22. “At the still point, there the dance is.”
—T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
Suggested by vkanicka
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
Suggested by Sam H., via Facebook
24. “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
—Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
Suggested by claires10
Suggested by Christina G., via Facebook Creative Commons / Flickr: yousefmalallah
26. “The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
Suggested by lisah4b5176fb6
27. “How wild it was, to let it be.”
—Cheryl Strayed, Wild
Suggested by Natalie P., via Facebook
28. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Suggested by Kati A., via Facebook
Suggested by Barbara B., via Facebook Creative Commons / Flickr: library_of_congress
30. “She was lost in her longing to understand.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Suggested by melibellel
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”
Suggested by Madeline M., via Facebook
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
Suggested by Liza
Suggested by Kristen S., via Facebook Creative Commons / Flickr: nancyvioletavelez
34. “The half life of love is forever.”
—Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
Suggested by xxx
35. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Suggested by Alyssa M., via Facebook
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
Suggested by Adam A., via Facebook
Suggested by Emily W., via Facebook Creative Commons / Flickr: michael_wacker
37. “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
—L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Suggested by Stacy W., via Facebook
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”
Suggested by Savey S., via Facebook
39. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
—Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
Suggested by Chelsea Z., via Facebook
Suggested by Sophie C., via Facebook Creative Commons Flickr: cedwardbrice
41. “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”
—W. B. Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
Suggested by niamhmdd
42. “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”
—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Suggested by uncnicole
43. “For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.”
—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
Suggested by TonyaPenn
Suggested by katepalo Creative Commons / Flickr: archer10
45. “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Suggested by Maria K., via Facebook
46. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Suggested by carlyh3
47. “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Suggested by foresth2
Suggested by babydolllolita Creative Commons / Flickr: smithsonian
49. “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Suggested by Tatiana H., via Facebook
50. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Suggested by Sara S., via Facebook
51. “One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
—Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices
Suggested by par0023
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