The 40 most powerful literary quotes of all time
Memorable, inspiring and impactful passages of prose.
The most powerful literary quotes have the ability to stop you right in your tracks. Whether you are looking for that perfect sentence to use in a speech or want a bit of inspiration for yourself, you can do no better than hitting some of the greatest books of all time and finding a sublime sentence or two.
We all know that an irresistible page-turner is a wonderful thing, but the very greatest novels pack sentences so prevailing that you stop reading, lower the book and simply live in the words for a moment.
UPDATE:You have been voting in your thousands for the most powerful literary quotes of all time, with Oscar Wilde's wondrous quote from The Picture Of Dorian Gray currently hitting the top spot. A few votes could change things, though so keep upvoting the ones you love the most.
Here we pay tribute to our 40 most powerful sentences in novels - the most powerful literary quotes that you will want to use again and again.
In the list, you will find some of the best authors that have ever put pen to page: from George Eliot to Stephen King.
If you have a literary quote that isn't on this list that you think should be, then head to the comments - and upvote your faves!
Most powerful literary quotes
1. The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Oscar Wilde
Year: 1890
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
2. The Road
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Cormac McCarthy
Year: 2006
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
3. In A Free State
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: V.S. Naipaul
Year: 1971
"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."
4. Anna Karenina
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Leo Tolstoy
Year: 1877
"It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it."
5. Breakfast At Tiffany's
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Truman Capote
Year: 1958
“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”
6. The Time Machine
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: H.G. Wells
Year: 1895
“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
7. Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Stephen King
Year: 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.”
8. Revolutionary Road
But now from AmazonAuthor: Richard Yates
Year: 1961
"No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying."
9. Great Expectations
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Charles Dickens
Year: 1890
“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
10. The Scarlet Letter
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Year: 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.”
11. Valis
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Philip K. Dick
Year: 1981
"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
12. Jane Eyre
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Charlotte Brontë
Year: 1847
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."
13. Frankenstein
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Mary Shelley
Year: 1818
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
14. The Witches
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Roald Dahl
Year: 1983
"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you."
15. Kafka On The Shore
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Haruki Murakami
Year: 2002
"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."
16. The Children Of Men
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: P.D. James
Year: 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.”
17. Invisible Man
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Ralph Ellison
Year: 1952
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
18. Moby Dick
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Herman Melville
Year: 1851
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
19. On The Road
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Jack Kerouac
Year: 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.”
20. The Handmaid's Tale
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Margaret Atwood
Year: 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."
21. 1984
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: George Orwell
Year: 1949
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
22. Ulysses
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: James Joyce
Year: 1922
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
23. Of Mice And Men
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: John Steinbeck
Year: 1937
"Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."
24. Middlemarch
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: George Eliot
Year: 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.”
25. Beloved
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Toni Morrison
Year: 1987
“You are your best thing”
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Year: 1605
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
27. A Room With A View
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: E.M. Forster
Year: 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.”
28. London Fields
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Martin Amis
Year: 1989
"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit."
29. Snow Falling On Cedars
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: David Guterson
Year: 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.”
30. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Zora Neale Hurston
Year: 1937
"She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her."
31. The Sound And The Fury
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: William Faulkner
Year: 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.”
32. The Mysterious Island
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Jules Verne
Year: 1874
"It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason."
33. The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Mark Haddon
Year: 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.”
34. Wuthering Heights
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Emily Brontë
Year: 1847
"Terror made me cruel"
35. Stardust
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Neil Gaiman
Year: 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.”
36. Birdsong
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Sebastian Faulks
Year: 1993
"I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine."
37. L.A. Confidential
Buy now from AmzonAuthor: James Ellroy
Year: 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.”
38. American Psycho
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Bret Easton Ellis
Year: 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."
39. The Price Of Salt
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Patricia Highsmith
Year: 1952
“Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.”
40. The Good Soldier
Buy now from AmazonAuthor: Ford Madox Ford
Year: 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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