The 45 most powerful literary quotes of all time

The most powerful literary quotes from famous books, poems and plays have the ability to stop you in your tracks. Whether you're hunting for the perfect sentiment to use in a speech or hoping to discover a bit of inspiration to get you through a difficult time, we highly recommend leafing through some of the greatest creative works of art.

Tense, thrilling page-turners are exciting to read. But hiding in the pages of some of the best novels of all time there are sentences that are so impactful, so powerful, that you stop reading and simply live in the beautiful prose for a moment.

In this guide we honour 45 of the most powerful sentences ever written. The most powerful, beautiful and heart-wrenching literary quotes that we hope you'll want to use and refer to or just contemplatively stare at again and again. We've included words spun from the minds of some of the best authors of all time, including Toni Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Stephen King.

If you love a literary quote that isn't on this list that hits you right in the feels every time you see it, then head to the comments – and upvote your faves!

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Most powerful literary quotes

at AmazonAuthor: Oscar WildeYear: 1890“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Cormac McCarthyYear: 2006“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”

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at AmazonAuthor: V.S. NaipaulYear: 1971"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."

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at AmazonAuthor: Leo TolstoyYear: 1877"It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it."

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at AmazonAuthor: Truman CapoteYear: 1958“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Stephen KingYear: 1982“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”

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at AmazonAuthor: H.G. WellsYear: 1895“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Charles DickensYear: 1890“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Richard YatesYear: 1961"No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying."

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at AmazonAuthor: Philip K. DickYear: 1981"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

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at AmazonAuthor: Nathaniel HawthorneYear: 1850“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.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Charlotte BrontëYear: 1847"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."

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at AmazonAuthor: Roald DahlYear: 1983"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you."

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at AmazonAuthor: Mary ShelleyYear: 1818“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Haruki MurakamiYear: 2002"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."

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at AmazonAuthor: Ralph EllisonYear: 1952“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”

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at AmazonAuthor: P.D. JamesYear: 1992“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Herman MelvilleYear: 1851“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Jack KerouacYear: 1957“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Margaret AtwoodYear: 1985"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."

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at AmazonAuthor: George OrwellYear: 1949"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

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at AmazonAuthor: James JoyceYear: 1922"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

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at AmazonAuthor: John SteinbeckYear: 1937"Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."

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at AmazonAuthor: George EliotYear: 1874“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale 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.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Toni MorrisonYear: 1987“You are your best thing”

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at AmazonAuthor: Miguel de Cervantes SaavedraYear: 1605“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

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at AmazonAuthor: E.M. ForsterYear: 1908“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.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Martin AmisYear: 1989"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit."

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at AmazonAuthor: David GutersonYear: 1994“None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we’re safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Zora Neale HurstonYear: 1937"She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her."

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at AmazonAuthor: William FaulknerYear: 1929“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.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Jules VerneYear: 1874"It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason."

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at AmazonAuthor: Emily BrontëYear: 1847"Terror made me cruel"

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at AmazonAuthor: Mark HaddonYear: 2003“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Neil GaimanYear: 1999“She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Sebastian FaulksYear: 1993"I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine."

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at AmazonAuthor: Bret Easton EllisYear: 1991"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there."

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at AmazonAuthor: James EllroyYear: 1990“Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You’re in with the former, but my God I don’t envy the blood on your conscience.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Patricia HighsmithYear: 1952“Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Louisa May AlcottYear: 1868“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

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at AmazonAuthor: L. Frank BaumYear: 1900“You had the power all along my dear.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieYear: 2006“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘Your life belongs to you and you alone.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Ursula K. Le GuinYear: 1990“Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Gloria E. AnzaldúaYear: 1987“I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”

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at AmazonAuthor: Ford Madox FordYear: 1915"Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing."

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