Fans of classic literature may know a few of these well-known quotes. Here we have compiled a short list of some of the most famed words from the classics.
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
Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at the bottom.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“Do you know—I hardly remembered you?”
“Hardly remembered me?”
“I mean: how shall I explain? I—it’s always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.”
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
In his deepest heart there surge tremendous shame and madness mixed with sorrow and love whipped on by frenzy and a courage aware of its own worth.
Virgil, The Aeneid
So, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn’t much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.
Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
And, just for good measure, here are a handful of runners up:
For now the seventh summer carries you,
A wanderer, across the lands and waters.
Virgil, The Aeneid
