The 115 Most Iconic Book Quotes That Will Stay With You Forever
There is something about certain famous book quotes, from a powerful opening line to an unforgettable piece of dialogue, that hit you right in the gut. Some make us feel more deeply than others, some make us ponder love and loss, courage and fear, some offer food for thought into the human experience, but either way, they all stick with us long after we finish the final page. Below are the best book quotes of all time that lived through decades to affect the hearts of readers. if you are quotes lover and went to read more quotes than visit quotes slide.
Classic Literature’s Most Iconic Book Quotes
Classic novels have some of the most timeless book quotes in literary history. The following ones are some of the famous literary lines of the good oldies; extracted between the 18 th, 19 th, and early 20 th centuries: the human nature and freedom, good versus evil, and the coexistence of people as society. During that period, legends such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Leo Tolstoy were putting down the thoughts that translated into English literature. if you went to read basket ball quotes than visit this page.
1. “There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Two Towers
2. “Only with the heart can one see clearly; what matters most is invisible to the eye.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
3. “I am no bird caught in a net: I am a free human being with an independent will.” — Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
4. “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
5. “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
6. “Real courage is when you know you’re beaten before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
7. “After a man brushes off the dust of his life, only the hard questions remain: Was it good or evil? Have I done well or ill?” — John Steinbeck, East of Eden
8. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” — John Green, Looking for Alaska
9. “This above all: to thine own self be true.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet
10. “‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.'” — E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
11. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
12. “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved
13. “We accept the love we think we deserve.” — Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
14. “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
15. “Once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” — Margery Williams, Velveteen Rabbit
16. “Seems to me we don’t never come to nothin’. Always on the way.” — John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
17. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
18. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” — Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
19. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
20. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
21. “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
22. “It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.” — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
23. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell, 1984
24. “Life is to be lived, not controlled; humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
25. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” — Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Opening Lines That Changed Literature
Some famous lines from literature work their magic from the very first sentence. These opening lines from classic books set the tone for entire stories and became part of our cultural memory. They show us how prose and dialogue can capture a reader’s attention instantly. if you went to read about Bible Verses About Not Giving Up than visit this page.
Modern Masterpieces: 20th Century’s Most Iconic Book Quotes
26. “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
27. “After all, tomorrow is another day.” — Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
28. “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
29. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
30. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
31. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” — Jane Austen, Persuasion
32. “So it goes…” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
33. “Laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.” — Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
34. “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” — Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
35. “When you play the game of thrones you win or you die.” — George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
36. “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
37. “Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.” — Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
38. “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, The History of Love
39. “Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.” — Yann Martel, Life of Pi
40. “Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.” — Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
41. “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” — L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
42. “You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Road
43. “Call me Ishmael.” — Herman Melville, Moby Dick
44. “It was a pleasure to burn.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
45. “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” — William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
46. “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” — Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
47. “‘And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!'” — Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
48. “The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” — Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
49. “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey
50. “Time is the longest distance between two places.” — Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Contemporary Voices: Recent Decades’ Most Iconic Book Quotes
51. “The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.” — Kate Chopin, The Awakening
52. “We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
53. “The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there and still on your feet.” — Stephen King, The Stand
54. “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
55. “Never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.” — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
56. “So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” — Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
57. “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
58. “Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.” — Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
59. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” — Roald Dahl, The Witches
60. “We are all one, all moving to the same end.” — P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins
61. “I wish to be perfectly happy; but it must be in my own way.” — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
62. “Love is holy because it is like grace.” — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
63. “Each time you happen to me all over again.” — Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
64. “Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared.” — Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
65. “How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create the versions of our lives we imagined.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
66. “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
67. “Life is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.” — Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
68. “There is always something left to love.” — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
69. “The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.” — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
70. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” — William Shakespeare, As You Like It
71. “Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.” — S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
72. “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” — Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
73. “If your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.” — William Goldman, The Princess Bride
74. “Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.” — Alice Walker, The Color Purple
75. “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Young Adult Literature’s Impact
Young adult fiction has also brought us some of the most brilliant and profound book quotes in modern times. It can be a tale of innocence and redemption, corruption and salvation, fate and free will, and even a millennial trying to figure out where he belongs in the world. It goes to show you that powerful quotes don’t have to come from classical literature.
Genre-Defining Quotes: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Beyond
76. “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
77. “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
78. “For you, a thousand times over.” — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
79. “How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.” — Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
80. “And may the odds be ever in your favor.” — Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
81. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.” — William Golding, Lord of the Flies
82. “All human wisdom is summed up in these two words: Wait and hope.” — Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
83. “Oh, the places you’ll go!” — Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go
84. “The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.” — Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts
85. “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” — Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
86. “If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.” — John Updike, Rabbit, Run
87. “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
88. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.” — Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
89. “What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
90. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” — William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Quotes About Love and Relationships
91. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, but already it was impossible to say which was which.” — George Orwell, Animal Farm
92. “Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
93. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
94. “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” — John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
95. “Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22
96. “All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” — J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
97. “Get busy living or get busy dying.” — Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
98. “‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'” — Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
99. “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
100. “You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Wisdom for Life: Philosophical and Inspirational Quotes
101. “Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.” — Sally Rooney, Normal People
102. “The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.” — Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
103. “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.” — Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
104. “Just like a murderer jumps out of nowhere in an alley, love jumped out in front of us and struck us both at once.” — Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
105. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
106. “I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren’t all that different.” — Veronica Roth, Divergent
107. “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
108. “We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse.” — Tommy Orange, There There
109. “I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
110. “Though sympathy alone can’t alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.” — Bram Stoker, Dracula
Hidden Gems: Lesser-Known Iconic Book Quotes
111. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness
112. “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
113. “We read to know we’re not alone.” — C.S. Lewis
114. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
115. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” — Ernest Hemingway
Why These Book Quotes Endure
What qualities make some book quotes truly iconic? Some of the all-time best book quotes have a lot in common. They express a sense of truth and perception about the human condition that is both confining and profligate. They promote complex feelings of time and memory, love and loss, or just wisdom and truth in a simply stated and immediate passage. Hundreds of well-known quotes and sayings become aspects of how people understand themselves and the world. They give us phrases for sentiments we previously couldn’t express. Whether from ancient classics or modern novels, quotes have the power to link people across the centuries and to the rest of the world. Great literary works have withstood the test of time by imparting that something that is forever in the human condition. The quotes that change the world around them attain that holy balance and help people to see themselves more fully and clearly. They all spiral back to the same fundamental understanding: reading temptation is as important as elegant lines or perfect passages that summarize a truth or perception in a single utterance. Throughout this list of iconic book quotes, you might come across lines that clasps your current self. Some may revisit old stories, while others may experience new feelings. This is the allure of timeless book quotes-they act as the building blocks or links between writers and readers, past and present. They are the silent words that join a common humanity.
