Literature quotes

The quotes that survive are the ones readers underline, write in margins, and carry out of the book with them. Literature is where language stops being utility and becomes a way to see — a sentence from Austen or Morrison can sit in your head for a decade and quietly rewrite how you notice things. The passages here come from novels, essays, and letters that papr readers return to. They are the lines that make a book feel like a companion rather than a product, the sort of sentences people quote aloud and then pause because the room gets a little quieter.

• There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

  Ernest Hemingway

• Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

  Toni Morrison · Beloved

• Tell the truth but tell it slant — success in circuit lies.

  Emily Dickinson

• Books are a uniquely portable magic.

  Stephen King · On Writing

• Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage.

  Rainer Maria Rilke · Letters to a Young Poet

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

  William Shakespeare · Hamlet

• There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

  Dante Alighieri · The Divine Comedy

• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

  Anais Nin · The Diary of Anais Nin

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

  Charles Dickens · A Tale of Two Cities

• Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.

  Emily Dickinson

• Hell is other people.

  Jean-Paul Sartre · No Exit

• The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

  William Shakespeare · Julius Caesar

• The only journey is the one within.

  Rainer Maria Rilke · Letters to a Young Poet

• You wanna fly, you got to give up the stuff that weighs you down.

  Toni Morrison · Song of Solomon

• Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

  William Shakespeare · The Tempest

• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

  Robert Frost · The Road Not Taken

• The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

  Stephen King · The Body

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

  Henry David Thoreau · Walden

• A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

  Hunter S. Thompson · The Proud Highway

• One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

  Virginia Woolf · A Room of One's Own

• Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

  J.R.R. Tolkien · The Fellowship of the Ring

• It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

  William Ernest Henley · Invictus

• Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

  John Steinbeck · The Short Reign of Pippin IV

• It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

  J.K. Rowling · Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

• All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

  William Shakespeare · As You Like It

• There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

  Maya Angelou · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• Not all those who wander are lost.

  J.R.R. Tolkien · The Fellowship of the Ring

• The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

  Rene Descartes · Discourse on the Method

• In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

  Dante Alighieri · The Divine Comedy

• If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

  Toni Morrison

• In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

  Albert Camus · Return to Tipasa

• Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

  Rainer Maria Rilke · Letters to a Young Poet

• 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

• There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

  Virginia Woolf · A Room of One's Own

• I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

  Charlotte Bronte · Jane Eyre

• The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

  Ernest Hemingway · A Farewell to Arms

• What's past is prologue.

  William Shakespeare · The Tempest