Quiz Bowl: Literature Quotes

"Hello babies. Welcome to earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of baby -- God #### it, you've got to be kind."

God Bless you, Mr Rosewater; Kurt Vonnegut

"Tomorrow I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day."

Gone With the Wind; Margaret Mitchell 1936. Epic civil war drama about Scarlett O'Hara and Rhet Butler (Vivien Lee and Clark Gable)

"We need never be ashamed of our tears."

Great Expectations: Charles Dickens, 1890

'Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.'

Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3

'To thine own self be true.'

Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5

'Brevity is the soul of wit.'

Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2

'Get thee to a nunnery.'

Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1

'To be, or not to be: that is the question'

Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1

'The lady doth protest too much, methinks'

Hamlet Act 3, Scene 2

'Frailty, thy name is woman.'

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2

"Have a biscuit Potter."

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

'We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are."

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; JK Rowling

'The better part of valor is discretion'

Henry IV Part 1 Act 5, Scene 4

'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.'

Henry IV Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1

'A man can die but once.'

Henry IV, Act 3, Part 2

"I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!"

Horton Hatches the Egg; Dr. Suess 1940 (Theodor Geisel).

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."

Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison 1952, Invisible Man is a novel about an African American man whose color renders him invisible

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."

Jane Eyre; Charlotte Bronte 1847, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic[1] master of fictitious Thornfield Hall. In its internalisation of the action—the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane's moral and spiritual sensibility, and all the events are coloured by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain of poetry—Jane Eyre revolutionised the art of fiction. Charlotte Brontë has been called the 'first historian of the private consciousness' and the literary ancestor of writers like Joyce and Proust.

'Beware the Ides of March.'

Julius Caesar Act 1, Scene 2

'But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.'

Julius Caesar Act 1, Scene 2

'The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones.'

Julius Caesar Act 1, Scene 2

'The fault, dear Brutus, lies not within the stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.'

Julius Caesar Act 1, Scene 2

'Cry "havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war'

Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene 1

'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.'

Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene 2

'Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.'

Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2

"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."

Kafka on the Shore; Haruki Murakami

'Nothing will come of nothing.'

King Lear Act 1, Scene 1

'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!'

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents!"

Little Women; Louisa May Alcott 1868

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

Lysander, A Midsummer Night's Dream

'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5

'Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?'

Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1

"What we do now echoes in eternity."

Meditations; Marcus Aurelius

"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone else too much, and forgetting you are special too."

Men Without Women; Ernest Hemingway

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13."

1984; George Orwell 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party, who works for the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue in Newspeak), which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to rewrite past newspaper articles, so that the historical record always supports the party line.[5] The instructions that the workers receive portray the corrections as fixing misquotations and never as what they really are: forgeries and falsifications. A large part of the Ministry also actively destroys all documents that have not been edited and do not contain the revisions; in this way, no proof exists that the government is lying. Smith is a diligent and skillful worker but secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother. The heroine of the novel, Julia, is based on Orwell's second wife, Sonia Orwell.

"Marley was dead as a doornail."

A Christmas Carol; Dickens

'Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.'

A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 1, Scene 1

'The course of true love never did run smooth.'

A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 1, scene 1

"We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."

A Room with A View; EM Forster 1908. A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done before; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of Times""

A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens 1859

"It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking Glass; Lewis Carroll

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina; Leo Tolstoy 1875. 2012 movie with Keira Knightly and Jude Law. High society scandal by an affair with the Count Vronsky.

"If you look for perfection, you will never be content."

Anna Karenina; Tolstoy

"It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it."

Anna Karenina; Tolstoy 1877

'All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.'

As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Beverly Cleary 1966, Ralph is a mouse who lives in the run-down Mountain View Inn, a battered resort hotel in the Sierra Nevada of California. Ralph longs for a life of danger and speed, wishing to get away from his relatives, who worry about the mice colony being discovered...

"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them alot."

Breakfast at Tiffany's; Truman Capote 1958. Directed by Blake Edwards on 1961. Featured song Moon River. Audrey Hepburn.

"My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time."

David Copperfield; Charles Dickens.

"The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water."

Don Quixote de la Mancha; Cervantes

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."

Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 1605

"There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights."

Dracula; Bram Stoker. Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

East of Eden; John Steinbeck

"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents."

East of Eden; John Steinbeck

"I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody."

East of Eden; John Steinbeck 1952

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

Edgar Allan Poe

"Nothing is so painful to the human mid as a great and sudden change."

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 1818

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."

Franny and Zooey; JD Salinger. "Franny" tells the story of Franny Glass, Zooey's sister, undergraduate at a small liberal arts college (probably Wellesley College). The story takes place in an unnamed college town during Franny's weekend visit to her boyfriend Lane. Disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her, she aims to escape it through spiritual means. "Zooey" is set shortly after "Franny" in the Glass family apartment. While actor Zooey's younger sister Franny suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in their parents' Manhattan living room, leaving their mother Bessie deeply concerned, Zooey comes to Franny's aid, offering what he thinks is brotherly love, understanding, and words of sage advice.

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

Friedrich Nietzche

"Beauty remains, even in misfortune."

The Diary of a Young Girl; Anne Frank is a book of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only known survivor, just after the war was over.

"We were received into the elements of the eternal pearl as water takes light to itself, with no change in its substance."

The Divine Comedy: Dante Alighieri

"All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost."

The Fellowship of the Ring; J. R R. Tolkien

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

The Fellowship of the Ring; J.R. Tolkien

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as is he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

The Great Gatsby; F Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The Great Gatsby; F Scott Fitzgerald

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The Great Gatsby; F Scott Fitzgerald 1925

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."

The Handmaid's Tale; Margaret Atwood 1985.Set in a near-future New England, in a totalitarian theocracy that has overthrown the United States government, the novel explores themes of women in subjugation and the various means by which they gain individualism and independence.

'All that glisters is not gold.'

The Merchant of Venice Act 2, Scene 7

'If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?'

The Merchant of Venice Act 3, Scene 1

"It is great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason."

The Mysterious Island; Jules Verne 1874. The plot focuses on the adventures of five Americans on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. During the American Civil War, five northern prisoners of war decide to escape, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, by hijacking a balloon. The secret of the island is revealed when it is discovered to be Captain Nemo's hideout, and home port of the Nautilus.

"I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me."

The Oddysey; Homer

"Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold."

The Outsiders; S.E. Hinton 1967

"Nowadays the people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde 1890. The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding the public morality. Oscar Wilde's only novel.

"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

The Princess Bride; William Goldman 1973

"Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches."

The Princess Pride, William Goldman, A fairy tale adventure about a beautiful young woman and her one true love. (Wesley and Buttercup). He must find her after a long separation and save her. They must battle the evils of the mythical kingdom of Florin to be reunited with each other.

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."

The Road; Cormac Mccarthy 2006. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance; Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 is an 1850 work of fiction in a historical setting, written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book is considered to be his "masterwork".[1] Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

The Shawshank Redemption: Stephen King. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison for the murders of his wife and her lover and is sentenced to a tough prison. However, only Andy knows he didn't commit the crimes. While there, he forms a friendship with Red (Morgan Freeman), experiences brutality of prison life, adapts, helps the warden, etc., all in 19 years.

"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

The Sound and the Fury; William Faulkner 1929

'Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.'

The Tempest Act 2, Scene 1

'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.'

The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1

'Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.'

The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

"It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of morning."

The Time Machine; H.G. Wells 1895. The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. Travel to 800,000 AD: the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks.

"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you."

The Witches; Roald Dahl 1983. The story is set partly in Norway and partly in the United Kingdom, featuring the experiences of a young boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating evil witches secretly exist.

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."

To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee

"Neighbours bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good luck pennies, and our lives."

To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee 1960

"Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit em, but remember that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee 1960

'If music be the food of love play on.'

Twelfth Night Act 1 Scene 1

'This is very midsummer madness.'

Twelfth Night Act 3, Scene 1

'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.'

Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Ulysses, Jame Joyce 1922. Ulysses chronicles the appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904.[4][5] Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early twentieth century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland's relationship to Britain. The novel imitates registers of centuries of English literature and is highly allusive. Considered one of the greatest works of all time.

"Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."

Of Mice and Men; John Steinbeck 1937. It tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place.

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what to do. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go.....

Oh, the Places You'll Go; dr. Suess

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelio Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon that his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude; Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, in the metaphoric country of Colombia.

'I am one who loved not wisely but too well.'

Othello Act 5, Scene 2

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that it had begun."

Pride and Prejudice; Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Pride and Prejudice; Lord Byron Shelley 1813

'Off with his head!'

Richard III Act 3, Scene 4

'A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!'

Richard III Act 5, Scene 5

'Now is the winter of our discontent'

Richard III, Act 1, scene 1

'What light through yonder window breaks.'

Romeo and Juliet Act 2, Scene 2

'What's in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet.'

Romeo and Juliet Act 2, Scene 2

'Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?'

Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 scene 2

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Slaughterhouse 5; Kurt Vonnegut

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'

Sonnet 18

"Terror made me cruel."

Wuthering Heights; Emily Bronte 1847. Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. Written between October 1845 and June 1846, Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Ellis Bell"; Brontë died the following year, aged 30.

"The seeds of life -- fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies ills or dulled by earthly limbs and flesh that's born for death."

The Aeneid; Virgil is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC,[1] that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

The Diary of a Young Girl; Anne Frank

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pate about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts - not to hurt others."

Middle March; George Eliot 1874. The novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch during 1829-32. Although containing comical elements, Middlemarch is a work of realism that refers to many historical events: the 1832 Reform Act, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV, and the succession of his brother, the Duke of Clarence (the future King William IV). In addition, the work incorporates contemporary medical science and examines the deeply reactionary mindset found within a settled community facing the prospect of unwelcome change.

"I know not all that may be coming, but be what it will, I'll go to it laughing."

Moby Dick; Herman Melville 1851