reading Classic Novels, and my Favorite Quotes in them
✓ A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
✓ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)
✓ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (1857)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
✓ Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (1973)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
✓ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith (1892)
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1823)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860)
Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854)
✓ Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
✓ I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson (1939)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (1837)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
✓ Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
✓ My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918)
✓ Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1854)
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham (1915)
✓ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
✓ One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Perfume by Patrick Süskind (1985)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818)
✓ Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (1904)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
Silas Marner by George Eliot (1861)
Staying On by Paul Scott (1977)
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (2004)
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
✓ The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1827)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880)
✓ The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
✓ The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)
The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse (1938)
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (1922)
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (1953)
The Godfather by Mario Puzo (1969)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
✓ The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
The Iliad by Homer (8th century BC)
✓ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860)
✓ The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1967)
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (1944)
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878)
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)
📖 The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
✓ To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
✓ Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (1962)
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867)
What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (1994)
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1848)
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1920)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (1974)
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."
He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks.
“Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."
"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humor.
"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."
"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!"
"I don’t know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)
A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm. — But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.
To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer, and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?'
If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
'Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!'
When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one.
They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!
Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.
'I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'
Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (1973)
“I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.”
“The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives of the continent in 1492. That was simple the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.”
“The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything.”
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
“Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”
“He even forgot that his wife Celia had committed suicide, for instance, by eating Dräno–a mixture of sodium hydroxide and aluminum flakes, which was meant to clear drains. Celia became a small volcano, since she was composed of the same sort of substances which commonly clogged drains.”
“I realized,” said Trout, “that God wasn’t any conservationist, so far as anybody else to be was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes of tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There’s a nice conservation measure for you. That’s God, not man.”
“Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.”
“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964)
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall, then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
“Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called cannibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.”
“I am the maker of music, the dreamer of dreams!”
“We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want - or near enough.”
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
Lights of ships moved in the fairway — a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.
For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind — as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness.
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies…
We live, as we dream — alone.
I don't like work — no man does — but I like what is in work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself, not for others — what no other man can ever know.
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.
It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — 'The horror! The horror!'
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.
Rose doesn't like the flat country but I always did - flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.
I have been resting, just staring down at the castle. I wish I could find words - serious, beautiful words - to describe it in the afternoon sunlight; the more I strive for them, the more they utterly elude me. How can one capture the pool of light in the courtyard, the golden windows, the strange long-ago look, the look that one sees in old paintings? I can only think of "the light of other days," and I didn't make that up...
It was pleasant being by myself in the house - one gets the feel of a house much better alone.
Deserts do not seem to be deserted in America.
What a difference there is between wearing even the skimpiest bathing-suit and wearing nothing! After a few minutes I seemed to live in every inch of my body as fully as I usually do in my head and my hands and my heart.
The warmth of the sun felt like enormous hands pressing gently on me, the flutter of the air was like delicate fingers.
Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth.
Watching sleeping people makes one feel more separate than ever from them.
I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.
He said he would come back. Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?
I like seeing people when they can't see me.
Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
It was enemies one wanted, not friends.
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.
My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918)
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.
This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country.
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.
On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU' the caption beneath it ran.
The three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.
He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals — DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER...
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’ the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — 'child hero' was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well.
In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime...
Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
The Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.
It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.
The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as ‘Sir’.
There was also something called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering — a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons — a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting — three hundred million people all with the same face.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides.
Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.
If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
The command of the old despotisms was Thou Shalt Not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou Shalt. Our command is Thou Art. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.
If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
The belly is a demon. It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday; it'll cry out for more tomorrow.
How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?
Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.
A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste
A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer.
In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.
Art isn't a matter of 'what' but of 'how'.
Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.
The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
There is always something left to love.
Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!
He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
Children inherit their parents' madness.
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (1904)
"How still the night is; nothing sounds alive. Now is the hour when children in their homes are a-bed... Compare with them the children on this boat about to walk the plank. Split my infinitives, but 'tis my hour of triumph!"
"Proud and insolent youth," said Hook, "prepare to meet thy doom." "Dark and sinister man," Peter answered, "have at thee."
"I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg."
"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it."
"Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
"When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
"Stars are beautiful, but they may not take part in anything, they must just look on forever."
"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness."
The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger; that there may be advantage from defeating the enemy, they must have their rewards.
So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.
Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy. Do not interfere with an army that is returning home.
There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general: (1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction; (2) cowardice, which leads to capture; (3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; (4) a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame; (5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.
When an invading force crosses a river in its onward march, do not advance to meet it in mid-stream. It will be best to let half the army get across, and then deliver your attack.
When the soldiers stand leaning on their spears, they are faint from want of food.
If birds gather on any spot, it is unoccupied.
He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.
Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look upon them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.
Rapidity is the essence of war: take advantage of the enemy's unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.
Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.
So that was the way. No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you.
He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.
For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)
Watch thou for the mutant!
This isn't a nice cosy world for anyone—especially not for anyone that's different.
If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.
I am not ashamed - I am only beaten.
The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Freedom, like everything else, is relative.
A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
I am not your justification for existence.
Faith is only a word, embroidered.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn't safe. But he's good.
If ye will all have it so, let us go on and take the adventure that shall fall to us.
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1967)
I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.
They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.
You get tough like me and you don't get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin' can touch you...
“I am a greaser. I am a JD and a hood. I blacken the name of our fair city. I beat up people. I rob gas stations. I am a menace to society. Man do I have fun!”
"Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold."
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too.
In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little.
“The rain is as contrary as I ever was,” she said. “It came because it knew I did not want it.”
Ben Weatherstaff says he is so conceited he would rather have stones thrown at him than not be noticed.
Eh! poor lad! He’s been spoiled till salt won’t save him. Mother says as th’ two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way—or always to have it. She doesn’t know which is th’ worst.
Then something began pushing things up out of the soil and making things out of nothing. One day things weren’t there and another they were. I had never watched things before and it made me feel very curious. Scientific people are always curious and I am going to be scientific. I keep saying to myself, ’What is it? What is it?’ It’s something. It can’t be nothing!
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.
I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us.
The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth's surface.
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
In the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (1962)
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked… In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.
The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.
The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.
I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.