"Nobody minds having what is too good for them."
— Jane Austen

"When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power."
— Alston Chase

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"No book is really worth reading at age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty...Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a timetable.
"
— C.S. Lewis

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"All we have is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

"The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers)

"In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"The only thing you have to decide is what to do with time that is given to you."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings - Return of the King)

"I will not say, Do not weep, for not all tears are an evil. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Little by little, one travels far"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

""Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." Galadriel in “The Lord of the Ring: The Fellowship of the Ring”"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"'What do you fear, lady?' [Aragorn:] asked.
'A cage,' [Éowyn:] said. 'To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.'"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!"
— Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other."
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"Perhaps it it our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another!"
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"What strange creatures brothers are!"
— Jane Austen

"Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings."
— Jane Austen

"A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
— Jane Austen

"Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how."
— Jane Austen

"My idea of good company. . . is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation."
— Jane Austen

"I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve."
— Jane Austen

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."
— Jane Austen

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"Stupid, shiny Volvo owner."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything."
— Bill Bryson

"Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and the are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls."
— Bill Bryson

"Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"...protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks."
— Bill Bryson

"If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like."
— Bill Bryson

"Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding."
— Bill Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away)

"I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that."
— Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you."
— Bill Bryson