Tom Waits’ catalog is full of jewels, but listening to his song, “Alice” last night made me think these lines might be my favorite:
I just love how the second question is afforded the same sort of detached rhetorical status as the first.
There’s a Cop Shoot Cop song that contains the line, “And the clouds outside your windowpane resemble crippled children limping slowly across the sky.” What a way to capture an entire psychological state in just one sentence.
In the clearing stands a Boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him out
Or cut him 'till he cried out
In his anger and his pain
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains
The simple-wisdom ones seem to be staying with me more these days.
Life is sad
Life is a bust
All you can do
is do what ya must
-Dylan, “Buckets of Rain”
You don’t have to lie to me/Just give me tenderness beneath your honesty
-Paul Simon, “Tenderness”
And there’s a line from a recent Tom Waits song -think it’s “Coney Island Baby”- where the singer’s talking about his honey and says, “the stars make wishes on her eyes.” 
Niiiiice.
That is an excellent line, although somewhat diminished by the fact Townes Van Zandt used it in a different (and in my mind, more effective) context twenty years earlier in “Pancho and Lefty”:
“Pancho was a bandit, boys
His horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel”
And (again in my opinion) that’s not even the best line in the song! I love this:
“Lefty he can’t sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down south
Ended up in Lefty’s mouth.”
jk1245, Steve Earle is a hell of a songwriter! When you consider he spent years honing his craft at the feet of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, it’s easy to see why!
jk1245 is smart, smart, smart!
I thought of one (I find it amusing), by George Thorogood…
“I drink alone, yeah, with nobody else.
Yeah, you know when I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself” 
Okay one more…
“And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.”
(I think I could do this all day, but should really do some work now.)
*Here comes the future and you can’t run from it
If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it
If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman
So join the struggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away*
Three great lines from “Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards” by Billy Bragg.
As a contrast, I kind of like the elegant simplicity of:
“I used to love her, but I had to kill her.” - Guns & Roses
You stole the song I was going to mention, but not the particular verse. So I’m going to post them anyway.
“And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whisper’d in the sounds of silence.”
Bolded the parts I like the best.
So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye/ so you think you can love me and leave me to die/ oh baby/ can’t do this to me baby/ just gotta get out/ just gotta get right out of here
Bohemian Raphsody, Queen
That has gotta be one of the greatest verses of all time. As a pre-teen, “Sounds” was the song that made me sit up and realize how good a lyric could be.
I always liked the little lyrical twist in the song “Knowing She’s There” written by Shel Silverstein and recorded by Dr. Hook. The first verse starts out:
“Knowing she’s there,
Makes it possible to live
Knowing she’s there
Giving all she’s got to give…”
then it goes through a few little couplets about how lovely it is having “her” there all the time, and then there’s a bridge:
“So why did it make me take the lady’s love for granted?”
And then the final verse:
“Now nowing she’s there,
instead of being here with me
Knowing she’s there
Giving him what she gave me…”
Sublime:
“She said 'You’re not the only one but you’re the best, Bradley.”
I love this line. It’s all about a girl who he thought was his girlfriend. She gets called on sleeping around, and admits to it, but flatters his sexual ego so he goes home iwth her anyway.
“Just let the lovin’ take a hold cuz it will if you let it. I’m funky not a junky, but I know where to get it.”
Kind of tragic since he actually died of a heroin overdose, but it is a catchy line.
“The bars are always open, and the time is always right, and if god’s good word goes unspoken, then the music goes all night.”
To a kid who likes to go out and party and play music in ‘The city that never sleeps’ this line rings true. Politics and religion should stay out of bars as well.
“Be positive and the love will come back . . .”
You know it. . .
“Bud Gaugh comes with his M-16, Snow come with the AK to the 47, Lovin’ the lovin’ the lovin’ the lovin’ DJ, All over a town called LA”
This is the source from whence my screen name was derived!
DaLovin’ Dj
Not a great line because of its meaning, but it’s hard to beat the alliteration and rhyming syllables of Warren Zevon’s greatest line:
“Little old lady got mutliated late last night.”
It’s just too fun to resist singing it.
Which brings us back to Rush…
“For the words of the profits
Written on the studio walls
Concert hall
Echoes with the sound of salesmen”
Or one of my favorites
“How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is, after all, so poorly lit.”
Or from Cowboy Mouth:
From New Orleans
“Take me back to New Orleans
And drop me at my door
'Cause I might love you yes
But I love me more”
From Easy
“Easy to bitch easy to whine
Easy to moan easy to cry
Harder to work Harder to try
Hard to be glad to be alive
But it’s really worth it
If you give it a try”
Queen - Killer Queen.
Just to annoy you all.
“But I can’t imagine it in better terms
than naked, half-awake, about to shave and go to work”
“Nashville” by Liz Phair. It’s a beautiful song about commitment.
Funny. I had a hard time picking between this verse and the one I posted. Thanks for picking up my slack JB
He said “It’s all in your head”.
I said, “So’s everything”, but he didn’t get it.
Fiona Apple, Paper Bag
someone mentioned Dr. Hook… how can we forget the classic I Got Stoned and I Missed It?