Literature

"The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything as beautiful as Gloria could be moral."

— The Beautiful & The Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

"For you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible."

— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

"All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet."

— Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches."

— Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

"…a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale… I crept behind It, and gave It my knife; but the knife went through It, empty as the air."

— Dracula, Bram Stoker

"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so."

— Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

"I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice."

— Ulysses, James Joyce

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."

— The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

"When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down."

— Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell

Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen —;

although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.

— Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe