Literary Quotes

From novels, plays and suchlike. This will probably be one of many installments. I quite like quotes, you see...

1. "There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. But omitted, and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves - or lose the ventures before us." - from 'Julius Caeser' by William Shakespeare.

2. "The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice." - from 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray.

3. "Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad." - from 'To Kill A Mockingbird' by Harper Lee.

4. "In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's." - from 'Silas Marner' by George Eliot.

5. "It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded." - from 'Of Human Bondage' by W. Somerset Maugham.

6. "My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees - my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary." - from 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.

7. "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 true." - from 'The Scarlett Letter' by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

8. "He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through - to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire." - from 'North and South' by Elizabeth Gaskell.

9. "A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man." - from 'Howards End' by E.M. Forster.

10. "Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun." - from 'Romeo and Juliet' by William Shakespeare.