Great Book Quotes From The Classics

It is rare that a quote captures the essence of an entire novel, but here are a few standout quotes from dozens of beloved and world-renowned classics.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

In his Petersburg world, all people were divided into two completely opposite sorts. One was the inferior sort: the banal, stupid and, above all, ridiculous people who believed that one husband should live with one wife, whom he has married in a church, that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, a man manly, temperate and firm, that one should raise children, earn one’s bread, pay one’s debts, and other such stupidities. This was an old-fashioned and ridiculous sort of people. But there was another sort of people, the real ones, to which they all belonged, and for whom one had, above all, to be elegant, handsome, magnanimous, bold, gay, to give oneself to every passion without blushing and laugh at everything else.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

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Banned! Classic Books That Were Removed From Circulation

There are some books which clearly present more challenging themes and unsurprisingly get excluded from schools and libraries or even removed from circulation entirely. However, there are some books which seem fairly innocuous but still manage to rile up certain groups. Take a look at these three classics which were considered so awful they were completely banned.

Ulysses by James Joyce

The 1922 work of fiction by James Joyce is considered one of the true classics so it’s unthinkable to consider that it wouldn’t be widely available. Yet when it was published it was deemed to be obscene due to both the sexual content within and the language used. The book was kept away from the US and any copies which tried to creep in were unceremoniously burned. The ban was overturned in 1933 when the publisher challenged the ruling in court and won.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

A piece of political commentary dressed up a novella, there’s no question that Animal Farm could have been controversial. However, the anti-Stalin sentiment was felt to be so unacceptable that the book was banned in 1946 within Yugoslavia, banned in 1991 in Kenya and banned yet again in UAE in 2002. Even in the more lenient UK, the subject was considered borderline with the release heavily delayed.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Written in 1865, Alice’s adventures have captivated generation after generation but not all readers around the world have had the privilege of having access to the text. In the Hunan district, the book was summarily banned in 1931 because the idea of having talking animals was deemed to be disrespectful to humans by putting them on the “same level”.

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The name game: Classic novelist and the names that made them famous

One of the jobs of a writer is to construct character, with carefully chosen names and personalities and a good author will show the journey that character goes on throughout the course of the story.

Inventing identities is a key part of any writer’s remit, but what if one of the identities they have constructed is their own? Many well-known writers use pen names to disguise their work, or if they are writing different genre and they want to keep it separate for what they are most famous for. For example Harry Potter creator JK Rowling uses the name Robert Galbraith for her series of detective novels.

However, there are a number of authors whose pseudonym is the name that has made them famous. Here are a few unfamiliar names of famous authors you may not know.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

The former journalist and steamboat worker adopted the name Mark Twain and would go on to make his name penning the novels Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Eric Arthur Blair

This man’s work has seen a resurgence in recent years to the volatile political climate. Best known or social and political cautionary tales 1984 and Animal Farm, Blair is better known as George Orwell.

Mary Anne Evans

Evans wrote mainly light-hearted and romantic novels in Victorian England, but when she decided she wanted to tackle more weighty issues, she decided to change names – and gender – and become George Eliot. Under that name, she would go on to right Middlemarch and Silas Marner.

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