30 beautiful sentences in literature

Frances Mackinnon, Staffer|May 3, 2017

  1. “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” —W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”
  2. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck, “East of Eden”
  3. “It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”  —W. Somerset Maugham, “Of Human Bondage”
  4. “At the still point, there the dance is.” —T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
  5. “In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.” —Maya Angelou, “Soul Shattering Poetry”
  6. “So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” ―Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist”
  7. “I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.” —Virginia Woolf
  8. “But we loved with a love that was more than love.” —Edgar Allen Poe, “Annabel Lee”
  9. “I feel infinite.” -Stephen Chbosky, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  10. “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” – L.M. Montgomery, “Anne of Green Gables”
  11. “So it goes.” -Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse-five”
  12. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” – Douglas Adams, “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”
  13. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”– Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”
  14. “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”
  15. “You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.” -Natalie Babbit, “Tuck Everlasting”
  16. “Stay gold, Ponyboy.” -SE Hinton, “The Outsiders”
  17. “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”
  18. “‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’” —Betty Smith, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”
  19. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck, “East of Eden”
  20. “At the still point, there the dance is.” —T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
  21.  “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” —Anne Frank, “The Diary of Anne Frank”
  22. “How wild it was, to let it be.” —Cheryl Strayed, “Wild”
  23. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” —T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
  24. “She was lost in her longing to understand.” —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Love in the Time of Cholera”
  25. “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.” —Bram Stroker, “Dracula”
  26. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.” —Charlotte Brontë, “Jane Eyre”
  27. “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.” —Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence”
  28.  “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.” —J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”
  29. “One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” —Cassandra Clare, “The Infernal Devices”
  30. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” – T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”