‘L’amour est un rose. Chaque pétale une illusion. Chaque épine une réalité’
Charles Baudelaire
‘ “Contrary then,” answered another, in deep but softened tones. “And now, kiss me, for minding so well” ‘
Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights
‘But then love’s not ruled by reason’
Alceste in The Misanthrope – Moliere
‘In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you’
Virginia Woolf
‘The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language’
Ezra Pound
‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’
Romeo and Juliet
‘to thine own self be true’
Hamlet
‘a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction’
Virginia Woolf
‘Literature is open to everybody’
Aphra Behn
‘Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires’
Leopold Bloom in Ulysses – James Joyce
‘language is wine upon the lips’
‘La tres chere etait nue, et connaissant coeur, Elle n’avait garde que ses bijoux sonores, Dont le riche attirail lui donnait l’air vainqueur, Qu’ont dans leurs jours heureaux les esclaves des Mores’
Virginia Woolf
‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’
Nigel Nicolson, on Orlando by Virginia Woolf
‘That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, a time will show.’
Ada Lovelace
‘Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden’
Virginia Woolf – Kew Gardens
‘you are the best thing’
Toni Morrison – Beloved
‘Fight till the last gasp’
Shakespeare – Henry VI
‘Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise’
Victor Hugo – Les Miserables
‘Reader, I married him’
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope… I have loved none but you’
Jane Austen – Persuasion
‘people generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for’
Harper Lee – To Kill A Mockingbird
‘I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then’
Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland
‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
‘I would rather be happy than dignified’
Charlotte Bronte
‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’
Oscar Wilde
‘We’re all mad here’
Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland
‘Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too’
Voltaire
‘Her affection for him was still the chief sentiment in her heart’
Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights
‘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 I had begun’
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
‘As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world’
Virginia Woolf
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’
Charles Dickens
‘each time a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women’
Maya Angelou
‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon ’em’
Twelfth Night
‘Now is the Winter of our discontent’
Richard III
‘we want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant’
George Eliot
‘the most exquisite moment’
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway
‘That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library’
Aphra Behn
‘La tres chere etait nue, et connaissant coeur, Elle n’avait garde que ses bijoux sonores, Dont le riche attirail lui donnait l’air vainqueur, Qu’ont dans leurs jours heureaux les esclaves des Mores’
Charles Baudelaire
‘It was love at first sight’
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
‘I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and also of Vita’
Virginia Woolf
‘we need never be ashamed of out tears’
Charles Dickens – Great Expectations
‘dwell in possibility’
Emily Dickinson
‘Words are life’
Markus Zusak – The Book Thief
‘I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything’
F. Scott Fitzgerald
‘the mind is it’s own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…’
John Milton
‘Who in this world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle’
Lewis Carroll
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’
George Orwell – 1984
‘if I had a flower for every time I thought of you. I could walk through my garden forever’
Alfred Lloyd Tennyson
‘I think of you so often you have no idea’
James Joyce
‘literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life’
Fernando Pessoa
‘Without literature, life is hell’
Charles Bukowski
‘In the end, we’ll all become stories’
Margaret Atwood
‘What a queer thing fiction is’
Vita Sackville-West
‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed…’
William Shakespeare
‘fail again, fail better’
Samuel Beckett
‘Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’
Virginia Woolf
‘I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life’
Virginia Woolf
‘La vie est faite de petits bonheurs’
‘The course of true love never did run smooth’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
‘If music be the food of love play on’
Twelfth Night
‘I have a secret self. It glows with preciousness. I have learned to keep this secret precious self to myself. Let’s see where it shall lead me’
Virginia Woolf
‘Times followed one another. Came a morn I stood upon the brink of twenty years, And looked before and after, as I stood woman and artist – either incomplete, Both credulous of contemplation’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Aurora Leigh
‘Her heart was made of liquid sunsets’
Virginia Woolf
‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’
James Joyce – Ulysses
‘I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful’
Louise Bourgeois
‘The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went’
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
‘But the human heart is devious’
Margaret Atwood – The Testaments
‘I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not, as long as one is forced to think’
Vanessa Bell
‘I hope or I could not live’
HG Wells – The Island of Dr. Moreau
‘The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink’
TS Eliot
‘nolite te bastardes carborundorum’
The Handmaid’s Tale
‘what fresh hell is this?’
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
‘nothing is so painful to the human minds as a great and sudden change’
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
‘My dear, I don’t give a damn’
Margaret Mitchell – Gone with the Wind
‘He’s more myself than I am’
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
‘Classic. A book, which people praise and don’t read’
Mark Twain
‘when I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values’
Simone de Beauvoir
‘literature is news that stays news’
Ezra Pound
Oh! You Little Things 