Powerful Lines From Literature That Will Really Make You Think

Updated 1 year ago, October 25 2022
Collective World, Deep Thoughts

Molly Burford

The half-life of love is forever.
Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.
Emma Donoghue, Room

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

We accept the love we think we deserve.
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
John Green, The Fault In Our Stars

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

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

Terror made me cruel.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore

Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
Toni Morrison, Jazz

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.
André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship Of The Ring

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Jack Kerouac, On The Road

What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

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