Favourite Literary Quotes

[SaraHoliday]

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 -

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

• Hamlet -

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."

• A Midsummer Night's Dream -

"Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together..."

• Great Expectations -

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."

Polonius is usually presented as a comedy character, but his advice to Laertes is very sound. 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be....'

"Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape."

• Great Expectations -

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.

"Listen to many, speak to a few"

• Hamlet -

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another"

• Hamlet -

"Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies"

• Great Expectations -

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.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality

l‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

— The Tempest

This is the beginning - from 'I' to 'we'.
If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself....For the quality of owning freezes you for ever into 'I', and cuts you off for ever from the 'we'.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No … don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is!”

• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin -

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

• Anna Karenina -

"I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

• Great Expectations -

"Take me as I am, whoever I am.”

• The Winter’s Tale -

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

• Lady Windermere's Fan -

"But there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely,
completely — or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."

• Lady Windermere's Fan -

'Sit by my side and let the world slip; we shall ne'er be younger.'
The Taming Of the Shrew

"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

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.

– Ernest Hemingway

"The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once."
Penelope Lively - Moon Tiger