Challenge: Favorite Quotes

This is part of the weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. If you'd like to participate, you can find the prompts here. They also put up a post every Wednesday where you go and link your response -- and see everyone else's. Check out their homepage to find it.

The challenge for this week is "favorite book or movie quotes and why" and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who uses quotes all the time here. 

I don't really have a coherent list of favorites, though; it's more a matter of what comes into my head under the circumstances. Still, here's what comes to mind first: 

1. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; but what the hell, it's home." Roger Zelazny (through his character Merlin) riffing off Yeats. Appropriate to the scene where it appears; also something of a recurring theme in my life. 

2. "Onward and upward. Nothing but good times ahead." Jennifer Crusie, from Welcome To Temptation (and also something she says herself, apparently). Can be said sincerely, but usually is an ironic statement made when things are about to go wrong.

3. "Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work. But I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped!" The Princess Bride, as I'm sure everybody recognizes. Because we've all been exactly that busy at some point. 

4. "It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, from a footnote in Good Omens. For a book that's fundamentally a spoof, it has some of the best-thought-out theology I've ever run across; plus, it's hilarious. (The TV version was also excellent.)

5. "Oh no, not again." The bowl of petunias from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Alternatively, from the same source, a thought that has stuck with me for years: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons."

So those are the top, um, five or six that come to mind for me. What are yours?