Livro favorito -- existe isso?

Na última mesa da Flip, autores leram trechos dos seus livros favoritos. Fiquei pensando muito nisso, em que trecho leria do quê se tivesse que participar de uma mesa dessas. São tantos livros, tantos trechos bonitos... Muito difícil escolher.

Eu não tenho um livro favorito. Tenho centenas de livros favoritos, e escolher um só seria uma injustiça com os outros.

Como Cees Nooteboom, eu talvez escolhesse o final de "Em busca do tempo perdido"; ou algum trecho de Fitzgerald ou Borges; ou, considerando o que anda pela minha mesa de cabeceira, o parágrafo final de "The Descent of Man", de Darwin, que não deixa nada a dever a escritor algum e que, de quebra, reinventou o mundo:

"Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

O que vocês escolheriam?