The Best Literary Quotes I’ve Come Across

As far as I can think, there are three criteria for me to classify a book as one of my favorites.

1. I am able to finish the entire thing in three days (indicating I had a desire to read it during my free time. Also, it isn’t too long or boring.)
2. It is somewhat philosophical, thought-provoking, and relevant. It is specific, with universal themes.
3. It is quotable.

When I read, I usually use a pen for a bookmark. I’ve developed a habit of underlining words and sentences that are beautiful and/or quotable and full of truth. So I’ve typed up my favorite underlined quotes that I’ve found in some of my favorite books that I’ve read recently.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

“How nice- to feel nothing and still get full credit for being alive.”

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”

“I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.”

“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

Courtesy of The Funambulist

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

“So I’ve lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess.”

“But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

“And the hour’s late. And  the war’s begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.”

“If the men were silent it was because there was everything to think about and much to remember.”

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

“‘So little happens,’ she said, ‘and I’m so good at remembering.'”

“…it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her…I would have spent that life among the living.”

‘I felt…incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live… I felt so close and alone that night. I just couldn’t be dead any longer.”

“I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.”

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”

“When I was watching you, I was so proud and so sad… When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense.”

“I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.”

Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“She knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent.”

“He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”

“But I was gone again by that time… everything got dark again… I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”

“‘…you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.'”

“‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.'”

“‘I’ve done nothing yet,’ he would say, ‘I don’t think I’ve got any real genius. But if I keep trying I may write a good book.'”

“There was little they dared talk about these days; seldom did they find the right word when it counted, it arrived always a moment too late when one could not reach the other any more.”

“‘Let’s borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.'”

“‘You know, you’re a little complicated after all.’ ‘Oh no,’ she assured him hastily. ‘No, I’m not really-I’m just a-I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.'”

“She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.”

Courtesy of sophiasch.wordpress

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

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

A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”

“I don’t want any one else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.”

“I’m not brave anymore, darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.”

“‘It’s raining hard.’ ‘And you’ll always love me, won’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And the rain won’t make any difference?’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s good. Because I’m afraid of the rain.'”

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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

“‘Never fall in love?’ ‘Always,’ said the count. ‘I am always in love.'”

“There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.”

“Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.”

“‘I’m in love with him, I think… It’s tearing me all up inside.'”

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“I have grown to love secrecy…The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.”

“But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself.”

“The moment I met you I saw you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be…I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad.”

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“He was like one…whose sorrows stir one’s sense of beauty.”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”

“I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle.”

“Perhaps in nearly every joy…cruelty has its place.”

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”

“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

“I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that-although I am quite sexy.”

“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.”

“You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.”

And this is me.

Sincerely,

Silent