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

"'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
— Mark Twain

"Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him."
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

"My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. "
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

"The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

"I am fortune's fool"
— William Shakespeare

"Trifles make the sum of life. "
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

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

"People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world."
— Louisa May Alcott

"I believe that a good children's book should appeal to all people who have not completely lost their original joy and wonder in life. The fact is that I don't make books for children at all. I make them for that part of us, of myself and of my friends, which has never changed, which is still a child."
— Leo Lionni

"They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century."
— Douglas Gresham

"I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time."
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

"Love is mysterious and rad, like Steve Perry from Journey"
— Diablo Cody (Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper)

"Oh! That look of love!' continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself in his own private room. And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in wich she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret could you have not of loved me ? I am but uncouth and hard, But I would never have led you into any falsehood for me."
— Elizabeth Gaskell

"My dear fellow " Said Albert, turning to Franz " here is an admirable adventure; we will fill our carriage with pistols, blunderbusses, and double-barreled shotguns. Luigi Vampa comes to take us, and we take him - we bring him back to Rome , and present him to him holiness the Pope, who asks how he can repay so great a service; Then we merely ask for a cariage and a pair of horses, and we will see the Carnival in the carriage , and doubtless the Roman people will crown us at the capitol , and proclaim us, like Curtius and the veiled Horatius, the preservers of there country."

Whilst Albert proposed this scheme, signor Pastrini's face assumed an expression impossible to describe."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea."
— Bram Stoker (Dracula)

"You'll shoot your eye out. "
— A Christmas story

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be, are full of trees and changing leaves"
— Virginia Woolf

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (Arthur Conan Doyle Collection: The Hound of the Baskervilles/The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes/The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire)

"the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982"
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Now I must give you one smirk, then we can be rational again"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

""There's no use in trying," She said: "One can't believe impossible things."
" I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.""
— Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There)

"Liste, if you think stubbornness deprived of intelligence is a worth-while possession, you are out of your mind."
— Sophocles Oedipus The King

"Give every man thine ear; but few thy voice:
Take each man's censure; but reserve thy judgment."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in
Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing
how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel?
in apprehension, how like a God? the beauty of the
world, the Parragon of Animals; and yet to me, what is
this Quintessence of Dust? Man delights not me; no,
nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seeme
to say so "
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"
HAMLET: To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered. "
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

- Bleak House"
— Charles Dickens

"Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go. "
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"If you cannot sound the depths of the heart of man or unravel the arguments of his mind, how can you fathom the God who made all things, or sound His mind or unravel His purpose?"
— Various

"Time collapsed into a delicate dark pencil brushed against our
eyebrows, the emergent rumble of crowds gathering above our heads. We
slid into our costumes. Pirate, outlaw, futuristic rebels. Red,
purple, gold. Chains hanging from our belts, tight black trousers. We
were moved upstairs, closer to the stage. Finally, we heard the
cannon's roar: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Tanzar
recording artists... THE MASTER PLANETS!" The world shot forward. We
stepped into the spotlight."
— Donald Gallinger

"He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him.

~ Stephen speaking of Rachael"
— Charles Dickens (Hard Times)

"Atticus, are we going to win it?
No, honey.
Then why-
Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win, Atticus said."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

""Exit stage left, pursued by a bear""
— William Snakespeare

"Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephant" above all their other magniloquent descriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian heir to the overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolisings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble thins-- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire-worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the mid-winter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tithings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is especially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; thouhg in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth where white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood."
— Herman Melville (Moby-Dick: or, The Whale)