We’ve rounded up a good amount of standout quotes from many beloved and world-renowned classics. Enjoy!
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
In his Petersburg world, all people were divided into two completely opposite sorts. One was the inferior sort: the banal, stupid and, above all, ridiculous people who believed that one husband should live with one wife, whom he has married in a church, that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, a man manly, temperate and firm, that one should raise children, earn one’s bread, pay one’s debts, and other such stupidities. This was an old-fashioned and ridiculous sort of people. But there was another sort of people, the real ones, to which they all belonged, and for whom one had, above all, to be elegant, handsome, magnanimous, bold, gay, to give oneself to every passion without blushing and laugh at everything else.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness.
Jane Austen, Emma
You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Time, which sees all things, has found you out.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.
George Orwell, 1984
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