More Literary Quotes

1. "Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us." - from Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.

2. "What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy." - from The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger.

3. "I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up." - from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

4. "These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life." - from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

5. "Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love." - from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

6. "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde.

7. "Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you - haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe - I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in the abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannnot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" - from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë .

8. "His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair and unwiped nose, 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." - from Lord Of The Flies by William Golding.

9. "The heaventree of stars hung with humid night-blue fruit." - from Ulysses by James Joyce.

10. "Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men's souls to joy." - from On The Road by Jack Kerouac.