Favourite Literary Quotes

SaraHoliday · 2026-06-09T22:51:33+00:00

^This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."^ - Hamlet -

snoopydoopydo · 01/07/2026 18:15

What a gorgeous thread. One of my faves is from A room with a view by EM Forster:
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."

Original poster

SaraHoliday · 01/07/2026 16:37

Grief is like the ocean; It comes in waves; ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.

OP posts:

BCBird · 12/06/2026 18:20

HelenaWilson · 10/06/2026 00:05

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

Looooove Persuasion
You pierce my soul .I am half agony, half hope.....I have loved none but you.

Purplecatshopaholic · 12/06/2026 17:56

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Wuthering Heights

Cerealcomplainer · 12/06/2026 17:49

Placetne, Magistra?

DL Sayers

FlorbelaEspanca · 12/06/2026 14:32

If our art has certainly, for the impression it produces, to defer to the rise and fall, in the critical temperature, of the tell-tale mercury, it still hasn't to reckon with the engraved thermometer face.

Henry James: preface to The Awkward Age

MoleskineNotebooks · 12/06/2026 09:27

HelenaWilson · 12/06/2026 00:05

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
That’s one of my favourites (obviously)

When you look at it, the whole story of Fanny Harville and Captain Benwick and Louisa was leading up to Anne saying that, the speech on which the whole plot turns.

A lesson in how to structure a novel.

I once read an article about Persuasion in which the author pointed out that although Anne was disregarded by her family, she was admired by virtually every male character in the book, either in a brotherly or friendly way, or romantically.

Well, kind of, but only either before she ‘lost her bloom’ (Wentworth and Charles Musgrove, who then moves onto her sister immediately) or after she regains it — when Wentworth first returns he says she’s so altered he would not have known her again, Mr Elliot sees her when the sea air has made her look prettier than usual, and Benwick is clearly one of those male bores who just wants a woman to listen to them emote. But by the end of the novel, she’s clearly at peak gorgeousness and generally admired. Isn’t there a scene somewhere where some strangers discuss her looks approvingly, and say they admire her more than her sister? Even her looks-obsessed father has noticed she looks well.

Original poster

SaraHoliday · 12/06/2026 09:12

38thparallel · 12/06/2026 08:45

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Henry David Thoreau

I like that one.

Me too.

OP posts:

38thparallel · 12/06/2026 08:45

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Henry David Thoreau

I like that one.

Friendlygingercat · 12/06/2026 01:50

"When religion and politics ride in the same cart and are driven by a righteous man nothing can withstand it."

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind."

Dune, Frank Herbert.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Henry David Thoreau.

TheKittenswithMittens · 12/06/2026 00:52

For he knows we are but dust * and that our days are few and brief, like grass, like flowers, *blown by the wind and gone forever.

HelenaWilson · 12/06/2026 00:05

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
That’s one of my favourites (obviously)

When you look at it, the whole story of Fanny Harville and Captain Benwick and Louisa was leading up to Anne saying that, the speech on which the whole plot turns.

A lesson in how to structure a novel.

I once read an article about Persuasion in which the author pointed out that although Anne was disregarded by her family, she was admired by virtually every male character in the book, either in a brotherly or friendly way, or romantically.

Anastasiaa · 12/06/2026 00:03

”She was both my shelter and my storm”

Arundhati Roy about her enmeshed relationship with her abusive mother in her recent book “Mother Mary Comes to Me”

Highonmyownsupply · 11/06/2026 23:59

Arran2024 · 10/06/2026 11:13

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard" from The Good Soldier.

And

"The past is a different country, they do things differently there" from The Go Between

Foreign country

AnneElliott · 11/06/2026 23:21

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. A tale of two cities.

AnneElliott · 11/06/2026 23:18

HelenaWilson · 10/06/2026 00:05

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

That’s one of my favourites (obviously)

Cooroo · 11/06/2026 23:11

“Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned; and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues."
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope

FirstofhisName · 11/06/2026 23:02

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one. -Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.

38thparallel · 11/06/2026 22:54

Mrs Quayne’s idealism spread round the house like flu.
E. Bowen The Death of the Heart.

SkippitySkoppity · 11/06/2026 22:54

AnneShirleysNewDress · 11/06/2026 22:39

Well now, I guess it wasn’t a boy that took the Avery Scholarship, was it? Is was a girl - my girl - my girl that I’m proud of (L.M. Montgomery)

😭😭😭

38thparallel · 11/06/2026 22:49

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. Tennyson

AnneShirleysNewDress · 11/06/2026 22:39

Well now, I guess it wasn’t a boy that took the Avery Scholarship, was it? Is was a girl - my girl - my girl that I’m proud of (L.M. Montgomery)

Daisychain700 · 11/06/2026 22:38

“Reader, I married him”
Jane Eyre

“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise”
King Lear

DisplayPurposesOnly · 11/06/2026 22:36

"Instant gratification takes too long."
(Postcards From The Edge - Carrie Fisher)

DisplayPurposesOnly · 11/06/2026 22:35

"And so to bed." (Samuel Pepys)

Would be my chosen epitaph if I were having a gravestone.