I'll give you the one I ran across today. Victor Hugo in Les Miserables is trying to convey the concept that a certain woman is not very maternal. His line:

"She is a mother because she is a mammal."

(Okay, okay so it's not from a book, but someone had to write it first!)

In The Left Hand of Darkness after they skint and threw out the pesthry carcasses she described how the scavenger animals would come eat the remains and then "lick clean the bloody snow".

I liked her line in The Lathe of Heaven that the reason nobody had bothered to tear down an old interstate highway abutment was because it was "so big, so ugly, and so useless as to be to the American eye invisible"

I know a good quote,

quote:

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Your contention that the Constitution is in some sense law must rest upon some obscure philosophic principle with which I am unfamiliar.

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Another favorite quote:

"And the goblins - they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven know better."

Howard's End, E.M. Forster

quote:

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A person in a fit of rage can be restored to good humor and a person in the heat of passion can be restored to good cheer, but a state that has perished cannot be revived and the dead cannot be brought back to life.

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You would think that I would learn to spell, wouldn't you?

quote:

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The Civil War ended, and Sherman's strategy of indirect attack had gained the victory... the march though Georgia and the Carolinas destroyed the South's will to continue the war.... But...If the purpose of war is to bring about a more perfect peace, then Sherman failed miserably. The memory of the damage that he and his men did was passed from parent to child...for a century after the Civil War...an enduring folk memory of wanton havoc that embittered the Southern people...

Bevin Alexander, How Great Generals Win

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And personally, I prefer:

My favorite lines -- from a Spanish poet, Octavio Paz, these last few lines of his poem "Fable"

A tree grew in the palm of your hand
And that tree laughed sang prophesied
Its divinations filled the air with wings
There were simple miracles called birds
Everything was for everyone
Everyone was for everything
There was only one huge word with no back to it,
A word like a sun
One day it broke into tiny pieces
They were the words of the language we now speak
Pieces that will never come together
Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shattered

A turn, and we stand in the heart of things;
The woods are round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it slips and springs,
The thread of water single and slim,
Through the ravage some torrent brings!