Dante Gabriel Rossetti

It is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster... The action is laid in Hell, only it seems places and people have English names there.

- describing Wuthering Heights in an apocryphal letter which may be the invention of Jorge Luis Borges...

William Shakespeare

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest, Act IV, Scene One, 148-158

Elizabeth Gaskell

A sleepless bed is a haunted place.

Mary Barton, p. 270.

Virginia Woolf

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction - so we are told.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

A Room Of One's Own

Franz Kafka

Once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell, there's no making it good again - not ever.

'A country doctor'

William Makepeace Thackeray

A woman with fair opportunities and without an absolute hump may marry whom she likes. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.

Vanity Fair, p. 25

Boris Pasternak

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life.

Doctor Zhivago p. 90

Adam Zagajewski

You'd think it would be easy, living.
All you need is a fistful of earth, a boat, a nest, a jail,
A little breath, some drops of blood, and longing.

'You are my silent breathren' from Mysticism For Beginners

T.S. Eliot

I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.

'The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Washington Irving

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement.

"A royal poet" from The Sketchbook, p. 87

George Orwell

It is strange to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as "robots", thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on him.

"Rudyard Kipling" from Collected Essays, p. 126

Thomas Pynchon

Next worst thing to unrequited love, isn't it? Insufficient hate.

Mason & Dixon, p. 752

Jean-Paul Sartre

I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present.... This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realize it's been there for a long time.

Nausea, p. 31

Arundhati Roy

Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

The God Of Small Things, p. 109

J.M.Coetzee

In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?

Foe, p. 30

Umberto Eco

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

Foucault's Pendulum, p. 32

E.M. Forster

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

A Passage To India, p. 25

Nathaniel Cotton

If solid happiness we prize,
Within our breast this jewel lies,
And they are fools who roam.
The world has nothing to bestow;
From our own selves our joys must flow,
And that dear hut, our home.

'The fireside', stanza 3

Georges Bataille

I was jealous of people with a God to hang onto, whereas I... soon all I'd have left would be "eyes to cry with."

Blue Of Noon, p. 126

Henrik Ibsen

Truths are by no means as long-lived as Methuselah - as some folks imagine. A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years; seldom longer. But truths as aged as that are always worn frightfully thin, and nevertheless it is only then that the majority recognises them and recommends them to the community as wholesome moral nourishment. There is no great nutritive value in that sort of fare, I can assure you; and, as a doctor, I ought to know.

An Enemy Of The People