What the best line in a book you have ever read?

The last line of the excellent "One Hundred Years of Solitude", by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated into English)

“…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”

I love first lines of books that drop you into the first scene. For example, although it's been repeated often enough to become a cliche:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

This is the first line of Stephen King's The Gunslinger. It conveys immediately the setting and essential conflict of the book. I love the economy of it.

Some of Richard Stark's first lines from his Parker novels are also wonderfully taut:

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.

... or ...

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.

Simple sentences, but you're immediately *there*. Great, great stuff.

HBJ

a couple lines from some books have stuck with me:

' Tell the Wise One that the Wonderer is weary' from The Magic Bicycle. i read that when i was a kid.

' Men have been throwing away paradise since the garden of Eden' I read that in one of Julia Quinn's books i think

' Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels, But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young... Dumbledore to Harry in one the the Harry potter books...

I'm particularly fond of good first and last lines. For example, "Moby Dick" begins "Call Me Ishmael". It tells us a lot about the narrator.

Joseph Heller began "Catch 22" with "It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him"

My favorite last line is from "Candy" by Terry Southern, a bawdy take-off on Voltaire's Candide. It ends "Good grief, it's daddy!

Shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased.

Callahan's Law from

Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson

From Breaking first mild (HA shocker. Stephenie Meyer returned): "Siobhan- a woman of mammoth presence whose extensive physique replaced into the two captivating and enchanting because it moved in soft undulations- replaced into the chief." Ugh. in common terms a strange sentence. No me gusta.

Why is the measure of love loss?

What you risk shows what you value.

Both from Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, my favourite book ever.

I'm sure it would have to be something from The Bible.

From fiction, perhaps this:

"It is a far, far, better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far, better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

~from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. These are some of the last words of the novel, and are spoken by a man who is about to be executed in the place of his friend.

In "How Stella Got Her Groove Back", the narrator is talking about what she needs in her life and says she needs to "smell somebody new". I think that is a great way to phrase how it is when you are lying next to someone you are involved with.

"But the line dividing good from evil runs through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own soul?"

from the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.