Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

• “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

John Steinbeck

• “Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.”

Antigone, Jean Anouilh

• “C'est plein de disputes un bonheur.”

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

• “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

• “The highest possible form of treason,” said Minton, “is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.” “I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.” “People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn’t pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved.”
• “Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.” “Or the college professors.” “Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.” “I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems...” “And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded. “They’d die more like mad dogs, I think—snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.” I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?” “In one of two ways,” he said, “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”

The Fault in Our Stars, John Green

• “It occured to me that the voracious ambitions of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the truth that everything might be done better and again.”

Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell

• “She wanted to lose herself in him. To tie his arms around her like a tourniquet. If she showed him how much she needed him, he'd run away.”

The Upside of Unrequited, Becky Albertalli

• “I always seem to know more about people that they know about me”

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

• “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”
• “But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”
• “It is invariably saddening to look though new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”
• “He must have looked up at the unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being reran, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...”
• “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffers & Annie Barrows

• “Men are more interesting in books that they are in real life.”
• “Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
• “I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.”

L'année de l'éveil, Charles Juliet

• “Je reste assis pendant deux heures, le regard dans le vide à ressasser de pauvres pensées qui n'entament en rien cet écrasant mystère. Alors je m'accuse avec hargne d'être un paresseux, m'adresse mille cinglants reproches, m'ingénie à susciter en moi une réaction d'orgueil, mais en vain. La pensée de la mort est là qui me taraude, et il arrive que toute envie de vivre me déserte. Pendant des jours, je demeure privé de volonté, suis incapable de me ressaisir, et le désarroi qui me gagne à la pensée que je m'enlise, que je vais à l'échec, que je ne serai qu'un raté, ajoute encore à ce qui m'enlève tout courage.”
• “Parfois, je parviens à surmonter ma détresse, mais je n'affirmerais certes pas que j'en arrives à être heureux. Ce n'est d'ailleurs pas ce que je recherche. Il me suffit de ne pas me haïr, de ne pas me sentir au fond d'un gouffre, de ne pas vouloir tout pousser au pire, pour n'avoir pas à espérer davantage.”
• “Mais quels mots seraient en mesure d'exprimer ce qui m'étreint et me brûle, m'anéantit et m'exalte, me désespère et avive cet ardent besoin que j'ai à m'offrir au plus tôt à la vie ? Très vite je me décourage. Je constante une fois de plus que rien ne peut traduire ce que j'éprouve, et je ressens cette souffrance particulière qui me saisit chaque fois que je dois renoncer à formuler ce qui en moi désirait tant se communiquer. Si je parle peu, si même je suis le plus souvent muet, c'est parce qu'au moment où des mots montent à mes lèvres, je sais qu'ils ne conviennent pas, qu'ils dénatureraient ce qu'ils avaient à transmettre. Je garde alors le silence, mais ce silence est lourd d'une pénible amertume, d'une haine de moi-même qui me met en charpie.”
• “Si Dieu est grand et tout-puissant, il n'a aucun besoin de mes louanges. S'ils n'est qu'amour, alors il doit spontanément manifester sa bonté. À l'inverse, s'il n'est pas bon, si même il est un Dieu méchant, ce que tant de choses nous porteraient à supposer, quel intérêt aurions-nous à l'implorer, à vivre dans la soumission et la crainte, à entretenir le moindre rapport avec lui ? Ne vaut-il pas mieux ne compter que sur soi-même, ne se tenir debout que par ses propres forces ?”

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

• “And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant - it is not fit - it is not possible that it should be so.”

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

• “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselve nor one another thus tenderly.”
• “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”
• “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”
• “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can.”
• “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an isntant?”

Les femmes savantes, Molière

• “Un sot savant est plus sot qu'un sot ignorant.”
• “Cette amoureuse ardeur qui dans les coeurs s'excite, / N'est point, comme l'on sait, un effet du mérite: / Le caprice y prend part, et quand quelqu'un nous plaît, / Souvent nous avons peine à dire pourquoi c'est. ”