Classic quotes from classic children’s books

We all love children’s books and here are some of the best lines from some of the classics.

“Frog said, ‘I wrote “Dear Toad, I am glad that you are my best friend. Your best friend, Frog.”’ ‘Oh,’ said Toad, ‘that makes a very good letter.’ Then Frog and Toad went out onto the front porch to wait for the mail. They sat there, feeling happy together.” —Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

“But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case, welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life.” —The Penultimate Peril (from the series A Series of Unfortunate Events) by Lemony Snicket

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.” —Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

“I like people who make me like them. Saves me so much trouble forcing myself to like them.” —Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

“My bath was too hot, I got soap in my eyes, my marble went down the drain, and I had to wear my railroad-train pajamas. I hate my railroad-train pajamas.”—Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst

“George and Harold were usually responsible kids. Whenever anything bad happened, George and Harold were usually responsible.” —The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey

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Famous Quotes from Famous Classics

We’ve rounded up a good amount of standout quotes from many beloved and world-renowned classics. Enjoy!

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

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness.

Jane Austen, Emma

You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Time, which sees all things, has found you out.

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

George Orwell, 1984

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Classic Books That Never Made it to Movies

With Hollywood constantly on the lookout for the next great movie adaptation, it may be hard to believe that some books considered classics by most have yet to be adapted to motion pictures. Here are two of the many classic books that have yet to be brought to life on the silver screen.

A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. A Confederacy of Dunces tells of the misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, an educated but lazy 30-year-old man, as he seeks employment. Along the way, Reilly comes into contact with several interesting characters in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the city in which he lives with his mother. Although the book was nearly never published, it earned Toole a Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1981, 11 years after his suicide. Although the book has long been slated for a film adaptation, it has yet to happen.

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Although it tells a rather heartwarming tale, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time has yet to be adapted to the big screen. The book centres around a 15-year-old boy who identifies as “a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties” who sets out to investigate the death of his neighbor’s dog. Although the boy’s condition is never specified, it is often suggested that the book serves as a wonderful insight into the life of someone with Asperger’s Syndrome.

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