100 Best Historical Fiction Quotes

You is kind, you is smart. You is important.Kathryn Stockett, The Help (2009)

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (2017)

You should first follow the plough if you want to dance the harvest jig.Ken Follett, World Without End (2007)

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2003)

Of all life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.Anita Diamant, The Red Tent (1997)

Love is what remains when everything else is gone.Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds (2021)

Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six (2019)

The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)

If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking.Lisa Wingate, Before We Were Yours (2017)

The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844)

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005)

People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (2020)

To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings (2014)

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.Stephen King, 11/22/63 (2011)

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)

A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed (2013)

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life.James Clavell, Shōgun (1975)

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us.Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020)

All human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘Wait and hope.’Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)

Marriage can wait, education cannot.Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

A true friend is a light in the dark.Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper (2012)

Science is still only a candle faintly glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World (1981)

The enemy is any-body who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea (2019)

You can’t find someone who doesn’t want to be found.Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (1982)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.R. F. Kuang, The Poppy War (2018)

Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015)

To gaze into another persons face is to do two things, to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own. Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name (2007)

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water (2023)

The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and youcan lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow. You hate too hard and you know therest of that story.Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Take My Hand (2022)

Maybe our lives are like gigantic jigsaw puzzles. You find the right piece and suddenly the whole picture has meaning.Lisa See, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (2017)

A great many things look different from a distance. Truth is like ugliness: you need to be close to see it.Emilia Hart, Weyward (2023)

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.Lily King, Euphoria (2014)

The longest way must have its close – the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

The human face has limited space. If you fill your face with laughing, there will be no room for crying.Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995)

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961)

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.Victor Hugo, Les misérables (1862)

A baby was like a revolution: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.Ken Follett, Fall of Giants (2010)

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017)

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.Lois Lowry, Number the Stars (1989)

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013)

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale (2015)

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008)

Poetry is like passion – it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.Kate Quinn, The Alice Network (2017)

I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea (2016)

Remember the small things, and the big things will work themselves out.Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018)

The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (2005)

It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity (2012)

The hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best.Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009)

Once you’ve fallen in love with books, their presence can make you feel at home anywhere, even in places where you shouldn’t belong.Kristin Harmel, The Book of Lost Names (2020)

Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself.Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller (2013)

Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.Antonio Iturbe, The Librarian of Auschwitz (2012)

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014)

For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary.Diana Gabaldon, Outlander (1991)

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011)

Never pass up new experiences. They enrich the mind.Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

You can smile when your heart is breaking because you are a woman.Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl (2001)

Life’s a mystery, isn’t it? People who try and plan it inevitably end up disappointed.Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (2022)

Books are a way to live a thousand lives – or to find strength in a very long one.V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020)

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), (ed. Penguin Books, 2006), Page 30

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow.Julia Quinn, The Duke and I (2000)

Scars are just another kind of memory.M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans (2012)

I would always rather be happy than dignified.Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds (1977)

Moments are history. If you have enough of them, they become a story.Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker's Wife (2012)

Giving a woman your whole life is meaningless without giving her your whole heart as well.Deborah Harkness, Shadow of Night (2012)

If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)

To be a woman is a great adventure; to drive men mad is a heroic thing.Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980)

The most expensive part of a building is the mistakes.Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth (1989)

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (1998)

A leader leads and you can’t ask men to risk death if you’re not willing to risk it yourself.Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004)

People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (2001)

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)

Fear is a hungry beast. The more you feed it, the more it grows.Kerri Maniscalco, Stalking Jack the Ripper (2016)

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994)

We are all eaters of souls.Dan Simmons, The Terror (2007)

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out.Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000)

Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.Hernan Diaz, Trust (2022)

If you make a deal with a fool, don’t be surprised when they act foolishly.Jeffrey Archer, Only Time Will Tell (2011)

Never let fear decide your destiny.Lucinda Riley, The Seven Sisters (2014)

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (2001)

The definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)