Classic Literature Quotes

There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and that is his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. - Mr. Knightley ~ Jane Austen

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics. ~ David Amram

Being an asshole? Or quoting classic literature? ~ Julie Ann Walker

You'll have to do better than that chaps, if you want to kill me! ~ A.F. Stewart

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost. ~ Anthony Esolen

Why is it necessary to everyone to read the classics? Shouldn't only specialists spend their time on these texts, with other people devoting their efforts to particular interests of their own? Actually, it is precisely because these works are intended for *all* that they have become classics. They have been tried and tested and deemed valuable for the general culture --- the way in which people live their lives. They have been found to enhance and elevate the consciousness of all sorts and conditions of people who study them, to lift their readers out of narrowness or provincialism into a wider vision of humanity. Further, they guard the truths of the human heart from the faddish half-truths of the day by straightening the mind and imagination and enabling their readers to judge for themselves. In a word, they lead those who will follow into a perception of the fullness and complexity of reality. ~ Louise Cowan

Nobody could have put her in the shade, blown out her light that evening; she was too evidently shining. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong. ~ Jane Austen

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Dantes remained confused and silent by this explanation of the thoughts which had unconsciously been working in his mind, or rather soul; for there are two distinct sorts of ideas, those that proceed from the head and those from the heart. ~ Alexandre Dumas

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. ~ John Buchan

Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead. ~ Alexei Panshin

As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again. ~ Margaret Mitchell

The classic literature is always modern. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare's startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

I see that my presence is burdensome to you. Painful as it was for me to become convinced of it, I see that it is so and cannot be otherwise. I do not blame you, and God is my witness that, seeing you during your illness, I resolved with all my soul to forget everything that had been between us and start a new life. I do not repent and will never repent of what I have done; but I desired one thing - your good, the good of your soul - and now I see that I have not achieved it. Tell me yourself what will give you true happiness and peace in your soul. I give myself over entirely to your will and your sense of justice. ~ Leo Tolstoy

One girl is worth more than twenty boys. ~ J.M. Barrie

Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl ... there was a boy ... there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did ... and what he did ... and how they learned to survive it. This is what they did ... and why one failed ... and why another triumphed in the end. And I know that it's true, because I danced at their wedding and drank their very best wine. ~ Terri Windling

Folks were doin' a lot of runnin' that night ~ Harper Lee

In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby. ~ Parul Wadhwa

So, teaching him only that which she loved, not that which she had been taught, Janet read to Gibbie of Jesus, and talked to him of Jesus, until at length his whole soul was full of the Man, of His doings, of His words, of His thoughts, of His life. Almost before he knew, he was trying to fashion his life after that of the Master.

Janet had no inclination to trouble her own head, or Gibbie's heart, with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. ~ George MacDonald

I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind; it's one of the most jackass ideas I ever struck; ~ Mark Twain

Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

I couldn't let you sacrifice yourself for me."

"Its not a sacrifice. My ambition has just changed. ~ Mariah Marsden

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. ~ C.S. Lewis

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author's intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don't make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author's mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, 'Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?'. Monet would be ripping his hair out. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Follow those rats! They may lead us back to Muggins! ~ A.F. Stewart

The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty. ~ Sinclair Lewis

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death. ~ Upton Sinclair

I sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I am cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediaeval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ways, and fly in none. ~ George Eliot

Rationality is the way to lead life. So high time,
let's stop feeding our dreams and shake hands with the reality. ~ Parul Wadhwa

A statement that is repugnant to one's beliefs can be as true as one that is pleasurable. ~ Taylor Caldwell

That is a compliment which gives me no pleasure. ~ Jane Austen

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The absence of fatherhood implies the impossibility of brotherhood. It is no accident that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre, in addition to Freud, all struggled with the notion of fatherlessness. Its exalted, but unrealistic, implication is godlessness and self-deification. But its more immediate, existential implication, as we have seen, is being orphaned and abandoned. It is curious that Freud, despite his extensive knowledge of classic literature, either ignored or repressed its most trenchant moral, namely, that by equating oneself with the gods, one invokes their anger and punishment. The gods will not be mocked, and they are intolerant of hubris. ~ Donald DeMarco

The classics constitute an almost infallible process for awakening the soul to its full stature. In coming to know a classic, one has made a friend for life. It can be recalled to the mind and 'read' all over again in the imagination. And actually perusing the text anew provides a joy that increases with time. These marvelous works stand many rereadings without losing their force. In fact, they almost demand rereading, as a Beethoven symphony demands replaying. We never say of a music masterpiece, 'Oh I've heard that!' Instead, we hunger to hear it again to take in once more, with new feeling and insight, its long-familiar strains. ~ Louise Cowan

No child is an island. They come from families. They are the newest braids in that cord of humanity, and it is right and beautiful that they should know something of what their parents and grandparents value, while at the same time having access to the classic works of human imagination that we all own in common. Contemporary culture will take care of itself. It's lively and loud and most children's lives are full of it. When parents read long-beloved classics with them and share stories that convey what we want them to know about the world, we can help them discover powerful narratives and pictures they will never find on PBS Kids or Instagram. ~ Meghan Cox Gurdon

The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands, and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long and that the light shone through them. ~ M.R. James

The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand. ~ Thomas Hardy

Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world. ~ Jack London

As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street's surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume. ~ A.F. Stewart

She holstered her weapon, raising the hem of her skirts and stepping lightly around the dead bodies. ~ A.F. Stewart

I am he whom you sold and dishonored - I am he whose betrothed you prostituted - I am he upon whom you trampled that you might raise yourself to fortune - I am he whose father you condemned to die of hunger - I am he whom you also condemned to starvation, and who yet forgives you, because he hopes to be forgiven - I am Edmund Dantes! ~ Alexandre Dumas

It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor. ~ Julia Child

On the Day of Judgment , life and death are not determined by the world but by God's wisdom and law ~ John Bunyan

Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. ~ Northrop Frye

So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star. ~ Charles Dickens

Ignoring somebody's mistakes in life from a powerful position makes you a saint, but the same act (whose intention
does not matter), if carried out from a weak position, will make you a coward or helpless. ~ Ravindra Shukla

MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT. ~ Various

A way a lone a last a loved a long the - ~ James Joyce

The thing is, if you get very depressed about something, it's hard as hell to swallow. ~ J.D. Salinger

Sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
– Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll ~ Lewis Carroll

...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her. ~ Ettore Scola

A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive because of any ethical reason it does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would kill it. It survived because it is a source of pleasure and because the passionate few can no more neglect it then a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read "the right things" because they are right. That is to put the cart before the horse "the right things" are the right things solely because the passionate few like reading them …

Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive Generations; whereas, with Classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative to decide your taste is unformed. It needs guidance and it needs authoritative guidance.

Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: ~ S. I. Hayakawa

That evening was the evening of the full moon. The garden was an enchanted place where all the flowers seemed white. The lilies, the daphnes, the orange-blossom, the white stocks, the white pinks, the white roses - you could see these as plainly as in the daytime; but the coloured flowers existed only as fragrance. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

I love food. I mean, I really love food. I take pictures of my finest, funniest and most fascinating dishes, post them on Twitter, and send them to friends. I treat menus like classic literature, refusing to skip even one word. I read the description of every item, regardless of whether or not I'm interested in eating it. ~ Rachel Nichols

I had realized that it was not the courage and generosity of the dead which had brought about this chaos of disaster, but the failure of courage and generosity on the part of the survivors… Perhaps, after all, the best that we who were left could do was to refuse to forget, and to teach our successors what we remembered, in the hope that they, when their own day came, would have more power to change the state of the world than this bankrupt, shattered nation. If only, somehow, the nobility which in us had been turned toward destruction could be used in them for creation, if the courage which we had dedicated to war could be employed, by them, on behalf of peace, then the future might indeed see the redemption of man instead of his further descent into chaos. ~ Vera Brittain

If we have lagged behind, dear brother, let us not be ashamed of it! So much is thrown away and lost on the road of the so called "times", that it is all right if there is someone to pick it up. I always fancy that the day will come when people will suddenly discover that they have lost what is behind them, and have nothing to gain from what is in front of them. That a moment may arise in their lives when they put the headlines and best-sellers aside and remember the verse of a hymn which they learned as children. That they will switch off the wireless for a while, and embrace the vast silence which ensues. ~ Ernst Wiechert

Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a gutsy, glowing account of one man's encounter with a potent spiritual practice and how it transformed his life. This is a precious book - that rare combination of solid wisdom and good literature. ~ Larry Dossey

Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood.

You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery. ~ Tobias Wolff

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Here
you warriors
why this moaning and complaining? Have you no more sense than toads and vipers? Our time hasn't come. Have you no patience? Are we not the 'trodden weed' still? The time is not yet here for us to raise our heads. Must you still complain? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa

Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed? But the nature of failure ensures that writers will go on writing no matter how many readers they have. You have to master the embarrassments and ignominies of life. ~ Howard Jacobson

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard. ~ Margaret Atwood

Rhyme and reason answer all problems ~ Norton Juster

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend. ~ Stephen Burt

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body. ~ Marcel Proust

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it. ~ David Foster Wallace

In the 80s there weren't so many bands around and nowadays there are a lot more bands around. I think sometimes there are too many bands. But there are a lot of interesting young bands around. They are not really playing the classic metal stuff, that's up to the old bands. ~ Udo Dirkschneider

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention. ~ Thomas C. Foster

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor. ~ Laurence Sterne

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point. ~ Daniel Suarez

We write to strengthen our soul and the spirit of other souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Let me have my tax money go for my protection and not for my prosecution. Let my tax money go for the protection of me. Protect my home, protect my streets, protect my car, protect my life, protect my property ... worry about becoming a human being and not about how you can prevent others from enjoying their lives because of your own inability to adjust to life. ~ Harvey Milk

You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich. ~ Robert Duvall

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days. ~ Bob Schieffer

Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade. ~ Shelley Jackson

Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year? ~ Horace

Poets must be grounded in the education of the arts, drama, history, mysticism, esotericism, and philosophy. To gain knowledge and become learned of the above is easy - read. Poets should apply this knowledge to their work, so a poet will advance to the next level, to their next phase of their emotional, psychological and spiritual development, growing in years in a short space of time, in hours or months if he or she is an avid reader. This knowledge will birth work that is not meretricious but of noble parentage. ~ Abigail George

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? ~ Aldous Huxley

Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it. ~ Ron Brackin

There is nothing political about American literature. ~ Laura Bush

And with distance in time it is the same as with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has; only its mists are even more gorgeous and delicate, its aerial perspectives are even more wide and profound. It also transifgures and beautifies things in far more various ways. For the imagination is all senses in one; it is sight, it is smell, it is hearing; it is memory, regret, and passion. Everything goes to nourish it, from first love to literature - literature, which, for cultivated people, is the imagination's gastric juice. ~ William Hurrell Mallock

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You can't go wrong mixing classic graphics in black and white. It's very Parisienne. ~ Brad Goreski

A mustache sends a visual message to the mating population of Earth that says, "No thank you. I have procreated. My DNA is out in the world, and so I no longer deserve physical affection. Instead, it is time for me to turn away from sex and toward new pursuits, the classic weird dad hobbies such as puns, learning trivia about bridges and wars, and dreaming about societal collapse and global apocalypse. ~ John Hodgman

There's something nice and valuable and wonderful about the suspense and the classic horror that doesn't just crutch on blood and the almost pornographic view of fear. ~ Amber Heard

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Christmas poem to a man in jail
hello Bill Abbott:
I appreciate your passing around my books in
jail there, my poems and stories.
if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with
my books, fine.
but literature, you know, is difficult for the
average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);
I don't like most poetry, for example,
so I write mine the way I like to read it. ~ Charles Bukowski

A little vanilla never hurt anybody." He nipped her ankle. "Great shoes by the way. Sexy as hell. ~ Hanna Lui

If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole. ~ Ishmael Reed

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was. ~ Jim Harrison

But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

I also don't trust people who claim for a classic to be their favorite novel. I think they're lying just to sound educated, or they simply haven't read another book beyond high school English requirements. ~ Colleen Hoover

The University brings out all abilities, including incapability. ~ Anton Chekhov

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk ~ Joseph Zobel

In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death. ~ Holly Black

This is based on Sauce Américaine. A classic French sauce, its recipe calls for crushed lobster shells and meat crushed together.
And then there's its rich, woody fragrance. I know what it's from now! COGNAC!" *Cognac is a variety of brandy made in Cognac, France. There are many strict requirements the brandy must meet in order to be considered an official cognac.*
"I see! When brandy is aged, it absorbs the scents of the wooden casks in which it's stored! That's why this curry has such a strong bouquet of woody aromas... like sandalwood and cedar!"
"Yup! That's right, sir. By the way, for this dish I experimented a little...
... and used Napoleon-Grade Cognac, which has even richer scents.
There are several grades of cognac, depending on how long it is aged. Napoleon Grade is considered the highest. ~ Yuto Tsukuda

The burning off and the gathering together are one. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking