We have gathered a collection of the 100 best short lines from novels. From timeless classics to contemporary masterpieces, enjoy the best one-liners from your favorite authors.
1
No limits but the sky.Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote (1605)
2
It is never too late to be wise.Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
3
Those who do not complain are never pitied.Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
4
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
5
The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844)
6
Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
7
Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
8
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
9
Trifles make the sum of life.Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
10
The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
11
Pretty things never do any harm.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)
12
Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860)
13
To love beauty is to see light.Victor Hugo, Les misérables (1862)
14
The best way to explain it is to do it.Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
15
The temperament reflects everything like a mirror!Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)
16
I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
17
Liberty is worth paying for.Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
18
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
19
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
20
God is not in strength but in truth.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
21
Hunger is pride’s master.Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper (1881)
22
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)
23
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
24
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
25
We learn from failure, not from success!Bram Stroker, Dracula (1897)
26
There is no place like home.L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
27
Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
28
Your soul is the whole world.Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1922)
29
Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.James Joyce, (Stephen said), Ulysses (1922)
30
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
31
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
32
Still, life had a way of adding day to day.Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
33
It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
34
For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
35
A love of nature keeps no factories busy.Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
36
Poor man. Poor mankind.William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
37
After all, tomorrow is another day.Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)
38
In the midst of life we are in death.Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (1939)
39
The best luck always happens to people who don’t need it.Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (1946)
40
The best books are those that tell you what you know already.George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
41
I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
42
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951)
43
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)
44
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
45
No one who is young is ever going to be old.John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)
46
An hour of freedom is worth a barrel of slops.E. B. White, Charlotte's Web (1952)
47
A man is never lost at sea and it is a long island.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
48
Those who don’t build must burn.Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
49
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
50
Words without experience are meaningless.Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
51
Not all those who wander are lost.J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
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52
You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
53
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
54
There is no story that is not true.Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
55
Things are never as bad as they seem.Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
56
Anything worth living for is worth dying for.Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
57
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
58
A state is no better than its leader.Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
59
Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
60
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
61
Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
62
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
63
The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes — never!Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1967)
64
Get smart and nothing can touch you.S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967)
65
I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.Mario Puzo, The Godfather (1969)
66
No art is possible without a dance with death.Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
67
Imagining something is better than remembering something.John Irving, The World According to Garp (1978)
68
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
69
Being poor is only romantic in books.Sidney Sheldon, Rage of Angels (1980)
70
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981)
71
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
72
The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
73
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
74
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.Stephen King, It (1986)
75
What makes us most normal is knowing that we’re not normal.Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987)
76
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
77
Your eyes show the strength of your soul.Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)
78
It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996)
79
A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone.George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (1996)
80
We can never flee the misery that is within us.Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
81
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997)
82
Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (1998)
83
We accept the love we think we deserve.Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999)
84
Fear cripples faster than any implement of war.Dan Brown, Angels & Demons (2000)
85
Even nothing cannot last forever.Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
86
Memories are worse than bullets.Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (2001)
87
Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)
88
Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2003)
89
Even strength has to bow to wisdom sometimes.Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief (2005)
90
When someone leaves, it’s because someone else is about to arrive.Paulo Coelho, The Zahir (2005)
91
Even death has a heart.Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (2005)
92
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (2007)
93
If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.John Green, Paper Towns (2008)
94
Politeness is deception in pretty packaging.Veronica Roth, Divergent (2011)
95
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014)
96
Do not accept an evil you can change.E. Lockhart, We Were Liars (2014)
97
It is easy to disappear when no one is looking at you.Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale (2015)
98
Unworthy boys make a lot of noise.Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)
99
Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018)
100
The only way to learn is to live.Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (2020)
