Dog-eared pages. An underlined paragraph. Something scribbled in the margin. These are signs the reader has encountered a passage that connects. They are moments that make literature … classic.
A Daily Progress editor invited fans of one of the newspaper’s Facebook pages to submit favorite quotes from the classics. The first, here, is from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield.”
“Don't you think that any secret course is an unworthy one?”
Written by Dickens in the mid-1800s, it was submitted as a quote that “applies to Mr. Schwarzenegger,” former California governor and admitted scoundrel. Ah, classic and timeless, too.
Below are a few others that came over the Net — modern delivery of classic material:
“What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
-Mark Twain “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
"We are the dead," he said.
"We are the dead," echoed Julia dutifully.
"You are the dead," said an iron voice behind them.
-George Orwell "1984"
"Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and bold idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?"
-Sinclair Lewis "It Can’t Happen Here"
"What sect do you hold out for? What particular church do you fetch up in?"
"Look about you, and judge for yourself. I’m in church now; I eat in church, drink in church, sleep in church. The ‘arth is the temple of the Lord, and I wait on him hourly, daily, without ceasing, I humbly hope."
-James Fenimore Cooper "The Pathfinder"
“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
-Gabriel Garcia-Marquez “100 Years of Solitude”
“I gaze at my wife and wonder ... Is it possible this old, stout, ungainly woman with her dull expression of petty anxiety and alarm about daily bread, eyes dimmed by brooding over debts and money difficulties, who talks of nothing but expenses and who smiles at nothing but things getting cheaper — is it possible this woman is no other than the slender Varya whom I fell in love with so passionately?”
-Anton Checkhov “A Dreary Story”
“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.”
-Robert Penn Warren “All the King’s Men”
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