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 -

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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

Placetne, Magistra?

DL Sayers

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

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

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.

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."