It is rare that a quote captures the essence of an entire novel, but here are a few lines from classic lines which do just that, curated by the Talekey review team.
It was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
It is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Who then may trust the dice, at Fortune’s throw?
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
When, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.
Jack London, The Call of the Wild
I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
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