Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl

• "Jews and Christians wait, the whole earth waits; and there are many who wait for death"

Aristotle's Poetics

• "Thought, on the other hand, is found where something is proved to be or not to be, or a general maxim is enunciated"
• "Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular"

Arthur Miller's All My Sons

• "I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer. My whole bloody life, time after time after time"

Boethius' The Consolation Of Philosophy

• "Decide to lead a life of pleasure and there will be no one who will not reject you with scorn as the slave of that most worthless and brittle master, the human body"
• "Wealth in its own darkness clouds the thoughts"

Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

• "The things you used to own, now they own you"
• "The first rule of fight club is, you don't talk about fight club"
• "Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club"
• "'At the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper,' Marla says. 'The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper'"
• "Marla said, 'This isn't like when guys sit backward on the toilet and pretend it's a motorcycle. This is a genuine accident'"
• "Nothing is static. Everything is evolving. Everything is falling apart"
• "'I knew this would happen,' Marla says. 'You're such a flake. You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap'"

C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle

• "People shouldn't call for demons unless they really mean what they say"

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

• "Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind"
• "'If you think I'm one of the people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong'"
• "'You see,' she said, snapping the top, and walking down the stairs, 'you are so very different from Rebecca'"
• "It was disturbing, like an enchanted place. I had not thought it could be as beautiful as this"

Gregory Maguire's Wicked

• "'I always think, I never feel, I never live,' he moaned. 'Can't I live once in a while? Just once?'"
• "'I have fought fire with fire,' said the Witch, 'and I ought to have done it sooner!'"

Homer's The Odyssey

• "Who, on his own, has ever really known who gave him life?"

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

• "It has to get worse before it gets better"

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

• "Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies"

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

• "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death"

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars

• "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book"

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals

• "While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep"
• "We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?"
• "Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them"
• "Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us"

Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes

• "How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents"
• "And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand"
• "Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights"
• "faces pressed against the pane, full of little, content with sawdust tears"
• "But the future lay open, a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities with a small quick heartbeat, delicate and impatient"
• "desperately knocking against the blind little world, i loosened one of its planks, opening a window to a new, wider world. There, spread out, was a profusion of geography, of atmosphere, of full empty air"
• "I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure"

Joshua C. Cohen's Leverage

• "Being a hero usually isn't much fun. It's terrifying, most of the time, right up until the point you make it out safe. It's being scared to do the right thing and doing it anyway"

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship Of the Ring

• "Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill"

Lemony Snicket's The Reptile Room

• "This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie"

Nicole Krauss' The History of Love

• "That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,' Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone"
• "Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked"

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses

• "One must not permit oneself excesses, except with persons whom one wishes soon to leave"

William Shakespeare's Othello

• "But since it is as it is, mend it for your own good"
• "How poor are they that have not patience! / What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"
• "To mourn a mischief that is past and gone / Is the next way to draw new mischief on"

William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

• "'Tis too late to go to bed now"
• "I am no more mad than you are"
• "I am not what I am"
• "Nothing that is so is so"
• "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em"