QuotesQuotes from classic novels
Lines from novels and stories that are still read everywhere, by Louisa May Alcott (1832 to 1888), Charlotte Bronte (1816 to 1855), Emily Bronte (1818 to 1848), Lewis Carroll (1832 to 1898), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 to 1930), George Eliot (1819 to 1880), Jerome K. Jerome (1859 to 1927), Rudyard Kipling (1865 to 1936), Herman Melville (1819 to 1891), Mary Shelley (1797 to 1851), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 to 1894) and Leo Tolstoy (1828 to 1910).
Louisa May Alcott
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Charlotte Bronte
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)Reader, I married him.
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Lewis Carroll
Curiouser and curiouser!
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)We're all mad here.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Leo Tolstoy
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett (1901)
George Eliot, Emily Bronte and Mary Shelley
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871 to 1872)Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Arthur Conan Doyle
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four (1890)You see, but you do not observe.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)
Melville, Stevenson, Kipling and Jerome
Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (1881)For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Rudyard Kipling, The Second Jungle Book (1895)I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889)
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Good to know
- "Elementary, my dear Watson" does not appear in any of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, so it is not listed here.
- The Tolstoy line is from the English translation by Constance Garnett, published in 1901. Other translators word it a little differently.