Classic Literature’s Famous Quotes

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

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Victor Hugo’s Cure for Writer’s Block

It didn’t take long for Victor Hugo to solidify his place among the most important, influential, and celebrated authors of all time. Early on in his writing career Hugo penned The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a book which not only shamed the city of Paris into restoring the neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame, but also one which influenced romantic literature and popular culture and continues to do so to this very day. Hugo’s influence extends beyond his writing, however. His political career spanned several decades, and he contributed much to the world of academia, serving as a member of the Académie française for nearly three years.

Like many writers, Hugo occasionally suffered from writer’s block. Where Hugo’s ingenuity and eccentricity becomes immediately apparent, however, is in his solution for the ailment. According to reports, when suffering from writer’s block, Hugo would remove all of his clothing and give them to his valet with strict instructions not to return his clothing until Hugo had written something. Hugo would then lock himself in a room with nothing more than a pen and paper, and would only emerge once satisfied with his output or until the day had run its course. Some speculate Hugo would shroud himself in a blanket while writing, but others maintain he wrote in the buff. A strange approach, perhaps, but given Hugo’s literary success, who are we to argue with his methods?

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Classic Novels and Their Cinematic Counterparts

It’s no secret that Hollywood gets much of its inspiration from books, and these two examples are no exceptions.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) based on Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981) By Gary K. Wolf.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Is a film that makes for fond memories for some, but the stuff of nightmares for others. The at-times bizarre combination of live-action and animation was certainly innovative, if not at-times unsettling. No less unsettling is the mystery novel it’s based on, which differs from the movie in at least one significant way: In the book, Rogers dies. Still, by all accounts the film was a huge success, and it played no small part in rekindling an interest in American animation, a fact that studios like Pixar and Dreamworks certainly owe a nod to.

Rambo: First Blood (1982) based on First Blood (1972) by David Morrell.

First Blood was Morrell's first novel, and although the screenplay went through a decade or revisions before finally making it to the screen, it was still a huge boon for his career, not to mention his pocketbook. Notably different between the book and the movie is the ending. Whereas John Rambo commits suicide at the end of the book the film altered the story to have Rambo turning himself into authorities, perhaps some foresight by producers who envisioned a lofty future for the franchise.

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