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 -

"If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village she must seek them abroad."

• Jane Austen -

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."

• Roal Dahl -

"Now I must give one smirk and then we may be rational again."

• Jane Austen -

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.

• Earl of Gloucester in King Lear

I get the feeling that this is a rabbit hole as endless as Alice's.

Absence implies presence; absence is not non existence

A Passage to India

That perceptible hush which precedes a crisis

The Portrait of a Lady

One who loved not wisely, but too well

Othello

'I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship'

• Amy, Little Women
Also
'I can be changed by what happens to me but I refuse to be reduced by it'
•Maya Angelou

'Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted'

Pride and Prejudice

(a great quote that I adapt for many situations, usually pertaining to locations slightly less fancy shmancy than Pemberley)

'I have never seen a dead body or a female nipple. This is what comes from living in a cul de sac'

Adrian Mole

Adrian at his best 😁

"And so to bed." (Samuel Pepys)

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

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

“Reader, I married him”
Jane Eyre

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

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)

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

😭😭😭

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

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.

“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

That’s one of my favourites (obviously)

"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.

Foreign country

”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”