Favorite Book Quote(s)

As the title indicates, what is your favorite quote(s) from the books you've read? And why? For me, I'll be starting off with two quotes from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway:

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

This opening line has to be one of the most iconic opening lines in modern literature. Every time I read it, I always wonder why she's buying the flowers herself- why this draws me in into the story and how it's one of my frequently used quotes. Woolf has a way of grasping the reader's attention and I believe this speaks for itself.

"There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes — so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale — as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower — roses, carnations, irises, lilac — glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!"

There is something about the way Woolf writes about flowers that just leaves me speechless every time I read this. This makes me imagine myself within an actual flower shop, being able to sense, feel, smell, and glance at all of these flora specimens. Doesn't that want to make you stop and smell the flowers during your day? Doesn't that want to make you see the beauty of the flowers, to appreciate the uniqueness that they might bring into your life? Passages like this make me wish we had writers like Woolf around today, writers that can take something as simple as visiting a flower shop and turn it into something beautiful that plays out within the mind.