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280 Most Powerful Literature Quotes From Best Loved Authors

Tags: love

Famous Literary Quotes

Top 10 Literature Quotes

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” – David Foster Wallace

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony. Half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.” – Jane Austen

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” – Harper Lee

“You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” – John Green

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” – Cormac McCarthy

“You don’t Love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.” – Jodi Picoult

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.” – Mark Twain

“You are your best thing” – Toni Morrison

“You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.” – Oscar Wilde

“To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.” – Evelyn Waugh

See also: 250 Inspiring Quotes About Reading & Books

Classic Literature Quotes

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“Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy.”

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

“Time, which sees all things, has found you out.” – Sophocles

“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.” – Alice Walker

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” – Tennessee Williams

“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.” – William Shakespeare

“They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.” – William Golding

“They held each other and kissed and pushed each others’ darkness into the corner, believing in each others’ light, each others’ dream.” – Hubert Selby Jr.

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.” – Charles Dickens

“There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.” – Dodie Smith

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

“There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.” – Sarah Dessen

“There is always something left to love.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” – Jack Kerouac

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.” – V.S. Naipaul

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” – J.D. Salinger

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”

“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” – George Orwell

“The best teacher is experienced and not through someone’s distorted point of view.” – Jack Kerouac

“The author says one character’s definition of a classic is any book he’d heard of before he was thirty.”

“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.” – Jane Austen

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” – Daphne du Maurier

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” – Sylvia Plath

“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.” – Virginia Woolf

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” – Lewis Carroll

“It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.” – Leo Tolstoy

“It’s funny. All one has to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.” – J D Salinger

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” – Charles Dickens

“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Ray Bradbury

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell

Great Literature Quotes

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“There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” – Zora Neale Hurston

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” – Willa Cather

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.” – Amy Tan

“The world is full of places to which I want to return” – Ford Madox Ford

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” – Ernest Hemingway

“The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.” – Kate Chopin

“The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end.” – P.L. Travers

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis

“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.” – Richard Yates

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“My heart is, and always will be, yours.” – Jane Austen

“My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.” – Charles Dickens

“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children” – William Makepeace Thackeray

“Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars” – J.R.R. Tolkein

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” – Kazuo Ishiguro

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” – Haruki Murakami

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.” – John Steinbeck

“Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.” – J.D. Salinger

“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.” – Leo Tolstoy

“He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” – Chinua Achebe

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.” – Charles Dickens

“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.” – Orhan Pamuk

“Get busy living or get busy dying.” – Stephen King

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – Margery Williams

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” – J.R.R. Tolkein

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” – Leo Tolstoy

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” – J.M. Barrie

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

“All human wisdom is summed up in these two words – ‘Wait and hope.’” – Alexandre Dumas

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Adversity is like a strong wind. It…tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.” – Arthur Golden

Famous Literature Quotes

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“Who, being loved, is poor?” – Oscar Wilde

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell

“When you play the game of thrones you win or you die.” – George R. R. Martin

“We need never be ashamed of our tears.” – Charles Dickens

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.” – George Eliot

“We loved with a love that was more than love.” – Edgar Allan Poe

“We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll

“’Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” – E.B. White

“Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.” – Ford Madox Ford

“We are asleep until we fall in love!” – Leo Tolstoy

“We are all fools in love.” – Jane Austen

“We accept the love we think we deserve.” – Stephen Chbosky

“Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.” – Yann Martel

“Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” – Margaret Mitchell

“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

“It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.” – Jules Verne

“It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.” – George Eliot

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” – J.K. Rowling

“Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” – L. M. Montgomery

“If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory!” – Mark Twain

“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” – Haruki Murakami

“I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.” – Ayn Rand

“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.” – Jane Austen

“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.” – Charles Dickens

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” – Harper Lee

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath

Romantic Literature Quotes

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“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!”

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” – Paulo Coelho

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” – Milan Kundera

“What’s the good of a home if you are never in it?”

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” – Emily Bronte

“Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched…” – J.K. Rowling

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” – Virginia Woolf

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” – Charles Bukowski

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.” – Margaret Atwood

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.” – Victor Hugo

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.” – Stephen King

“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

“The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.” – Charles Dickens

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” – John Green

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.” – Markus Zusak

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.”

“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.” – H.G. Wells

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” – J.K. Rowling

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” – Philip K. Dick

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” – J.K. Rowling

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” – Louisa May Alcott

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” – Charlotte Brontë

“How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.” – Colleen McCullough

“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” – James Joyce

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” – Emily Brontë

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – John Keats

“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”

“Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.” – Alexandre Dumas

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.” – Franz Kafka

“’Are you ready?’ Klaus asked finally. ‘No,’ Sunny answered. ‘Me neither,’ Violet said, ‘but if we wait until we’re ready we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let’s go.’” – Daniel Handler

“Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.” – Joseph Heller

“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.” – Truman Capote

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” – Paulo Coelho

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better” – George Eliot

Literature Quotes About Love

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“It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” – E.M. Forster

“It is better to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.” – William Makepeace Thackeray

“It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.” – Patrick Rothfuss

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” – Roald Dahl

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.” – George Orwell

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.” – John Updike

“If it’s true that here are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” – Leo Tolstoy

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” – Jane Austen

“If I know what love is, it is because of you.” – Hermann Hesse

“I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.” – Leo Tolstoy

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” – Charles Dickens

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” – Pablo Neruda

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.” – Daphne duMaurier

“He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope.’” – Alexandre Dumas

“Having begun to love you, I love you for ever – in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself.” – Thomas Hardy

“Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.” – Rumi

“For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary” – Diana Gabaldon

“Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.” – Neil Gaiman

“Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.” – William Goldman

“Doubt thou that the sun is fire, Doubt that that the sun does move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt that I love.” – William Shakespeare

“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” – Toni Morrison

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” – John Green

“And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.” – Khalil Gibran

“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” – Leo Tolstoy

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” – Jack Kerouac

“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” – A.A. Milne

“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.” – Homer

“None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we’re safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is.” – David Guterson

“Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” – Aldous Huxley

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” – Erich Segal

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.” – Viktor E. Frankl

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” – Milan Kundera

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” – Robert A. Heinlein

“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” – Toni Morrison

“Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” – Zora Neale Hurston

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.” – Victor Hugo

“Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.” – Paulo Coelho

“Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” – Marilynne Robinson

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.” – Thomas Hardy

“Love is a great beautifier.” – Louisa May Alcott

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I have got key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.” – Louisa May Alcott

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.” – Donna Tartt

“I gave my whole heart up, for him to hold.” – Geoffrey Chaucer

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” – Jane Austen

“I assure you that the world is not so amusing as something we imagined.” – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Literature Quotes About Life

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“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.” – Robert Fulghum

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.” – P.D. James

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our one little life is rounded with a sleep.” – William Shakespeare

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” – Arundhati Roy

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.” – Victor Hugo

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.” – Bret Easton Ellis

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!” – Douglas Adams

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” – George Eliot

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.” – Zora Neale Hurston

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” – Nicole Krauss

“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,–a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.” – Gustave Flaubert

“If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.” – Anton Chekhov

“If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.” – André Aciman

“I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.” – Ian McEwan

“I would rather spend one lifetime with you, than face all the ages of this world alone.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” – F Scott Fitzgerald

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love – I have found you. You are my sympathy – my better self – my good angel – I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you – and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.” – Charlotte Brontë

“I felt purged and holy and ready for a new life.” – Sylvia Plath

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” – Ernest Hemingway

“Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.” – Dante Alighieri

“I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who’s ever lived: I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough.” – Nicholas Sparks

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.” – Nicholas Sparks

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” – William Faulkner

“And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.” – Kiersten White

“A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill?” – John Steinbeck

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.” – Madeleine L’Engle

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” – Ralph Ellison

“Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.” – Amit Ray

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.” – Charlotte Brontë

Literature Quotes About Friendship

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“Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll

“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are.” – Mark Haddon

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” – Jonathan Safran Foer

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” – Stephen King

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” – Paulo Coelho

“So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” – Norton Juster

“So it goes…” – Kurt Vonnegut

“She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was – anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.” – Charles Dickens

“She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.” – Neil Gaiman

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” – Harper Lee

“One day I will find the right words, and they all will be simple.” – Jack Kerouac

“Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.” – Dr. Seuss

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” – Mary Shelley

“Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” – Paulo Coehlo

“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J R R Tolkein

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.” – Betty Smith

“Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, ‘You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.’ It’s saying, ‘You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.’” – Jodi Picoult

“For you, a thousand times over.” – Khaled Hosseini

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.” – Jonathan Swift

“Every atom of your flesh is dear to me as my own: In pain and sickness it would still be dear.” – Charlotte Brontë

“Ever’body’s askin’ that. ‘What we comin’ to?’ Seems to me we don’t never come to nothin’. Always on the way.” – John Steinbeck

“Each time you happen to me all over again.” – Edith Wharton

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” – J. D. Salinger

“’And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!’” – Maurice Sendak

“‘Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” – E.B. White

“‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’” – Ernest Hemingway

“’And tho’ / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’” – Alfred

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.” – Martin Amis

“And may the odds be ever in your favor.” – Suzanne Collins

“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.” – J.K. Rowling

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” – Frank Herbert

“Call me Ishmael.” – Herman Melville

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” – William Shakespeare

“Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared.” – Angie Thomas

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” – Mary Shelley

Literature Quotes About Death

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“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

“The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity — it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.” – Yann Martel

“Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.” – Thomas Mann

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” – William Golding

“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” – Charles Dickens

“Predominant options are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.” – Flora Rheta Schreiber

“Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.” – Patricia Highsmith

“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.” – Paulo Coelho

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” – Anthony Doerr

“It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.” – Victor Hugo

“I remembered everything. I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull. Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.” – Sylvia Plath

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.” – Sebastian Faulks

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go it laughing.” – Herman Melville

Originally published December 29, 2021, updated December 29, 2021

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