The best book quotes linger long after you’ve read them, and are often there when we need them the most: whether it’s the happiest day of our lives, or the hardest one. They are words of advice or inspiration, bits of rare beauty, or even raw moments of pain that are so perfectly expressed, they become unforgettable. Often, they stand independently, unable to be paraphrased; whether they are intimate expressions of love or brutal confessions of truth, the perfect scene painted in with words, or the deepest emotion rendered in a sentence. Every genre is filled with great book quotes that strike a chord in your heart.
Here are 25 of some of the best book quotes of all time, and although every book has at least a line or two worth remembering, these ones never fail to make me think and feel inspired!
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“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” –Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” –Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” –Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
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“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” –Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” –Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” –Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
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“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.” –Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbir
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“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” –Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
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“Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.” –William Goldman, The Princess Bride
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“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind — wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.” –Toni Morrison, Beloved
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“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” –Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” –J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
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“At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” –Willa Cather, My Antonia
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“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” –John Steinbeck, East of Eden
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“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.” –Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things
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“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” –J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
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“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.” –Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” –Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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“The curves of your lips rewrite history.” –Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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“Let the wild rumpus start!” –Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
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“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” –James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.” –Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” –Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
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“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” –Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices