The most powerful literary quotes

The very greatest novels pack sentences so prevailing that you stop reading, lower the book and simply live in the words for a moment. Here are the most powerful sentences in novels, curated by the Viewtale review team.

Of Mice And Men

Author: John Steinbeck

Year: 1937

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

Invisible Man

Author: Ralph Ellison

Year: 1952

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

Wuthering Heights

Author: Emily Brontë

Year: 1847

"Terror made me cruel"

L.A. Confidential

Author: 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.”

On The Road

Author: 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.”

1984

Author: George Orwell

Year: 1949

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

The Handmaid's Tale

Author: 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."

The Time Machine

Author: H.G. Wells

Year: 1895

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

Anna Karenina

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Year: 1877

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

Jane Eyre

Author: Charlotte Brontë

Year: 1847

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

The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Year: 2006

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”

American Psycho

Author: 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."

Don Quixote

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.”

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