The 45 most powerful literary quotes of all time

Key quote: The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

Key quote: Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: You had the power all along my dear.

Key quote: I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Key quote: Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: Terror made me cruel.

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

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

Key quote: 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.

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

Key quote: You are your best thing.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

Key quote: History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Key quote: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.

Key quote: 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.

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

Key quote: Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

Key quote: Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

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

Key quote: Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Key quote: No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

Key quote: We need never be ashamed of our tears.

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

Key quote: 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.

Key quote: Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.

Key quote: It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it

Key quote: The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Key quote: You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

Key quote: Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.