Recommended & Favorite Authors of Fiction & Poetry

"Do you think I am an automaton? ­— a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!"
~Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

We may gasp in untold terror but with that gasp we drink in a breath of thy divinity. Our hearts shake, it's currents sway like rivers lifted by an earthquake, but we have swallowed strength! To see and know the truth is to take from fear her main advantage....
~Charlotte Bronte, Villette

A person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
~ Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
~Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!
~Jane Austen, Sense And Sensibility

Hope but was a timid friend--
She sat without my grated den
Watching how my fate would tend
Even as selfish-hearted men.
She was cruel in her fear.
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there
And she turned her face away!
Like a false guard, false watch keeping
Still in strife she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping,
If I listened she would cease.
False she was, and unrelenting.
When my last joys strewed the ground
Even sorrow saw repenting
Those sad relics scattered round;
Hope--whose whisper would have given
Balm to all that frenzied pain--
Stretched her wings and soared to heaven;
Went---and ne'er returned again!
~Emily Bronte

Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe.
~Anne Bronte

But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.
~Anne Brontë

Oh they had robbed me of the hope my spirit held so dear;
They will not let me hear that voice my soul delights to hear.
They will not let me see that face I so delight to see
And they have taken all thy smiles and all thy love from me.
Well, let them seize on all they can, one treasure still is mine,
A heart that loves to think on thee and feels the worth of thine.
~Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey, Chapter 17

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were--- I have not seen
As others saw--- I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov'd, I lov'd alone.
Then---in my childhood--- in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--- was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In it's autumn tint of gold---
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by---
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
~Edgar Allan Poe

Nothing you can say can convince his false nature of your truth...
~Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Our words are always giants when they betray us, and dwarf whenever they do
us justice.
~Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

But when a woman has no one to help her, is she to bear everything without turning upon those who ill-use her? Shall a woman be flayed alive because it is unfeminine in her to fight for her own skin?
~Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

I have no life but this,
To lead it here;
Nor any death, but lest
Dispelled from there;
Nor tie to earths to come,
Nor action new,
Except through this extent,
The realm of you.
~Emily Dickinson

We shall see but little way if we are required to understand what we see.
How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile?
~Henry David Thoreau

It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination.
~Henry David Thoreau

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate
with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art
nearest to life itself.
~Henry David Thoreau

Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.
~Henry David Thoreau

All good things are wild and free.
~Henry David Thoreau

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Note-books

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
~Oscar Wilde

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
~Oscar Wilde

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others
only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all
ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see nature at all.
But to the eyes of the man of imagination,
nature is imagination itself.
~William Blake

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
Oh, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to ever wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
~William Shakespeare

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.
~Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret

Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time; but when the noise dies away,
we cut open the drum, and find it was emptiness that made the music.
~Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.
~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Homes

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.
~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Were nature just to man from his first hour, he need not ask for mercy. Then tis for us, the toys of nature, to be both just and merciful. For so only can the wrongs she does be undone.

~Frances Hodgsen Burnett, A Lady of Quality

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
~Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
~Thomas Hardy

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
~Thomas Hardy

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
~Thomas Hardy

Behold when thy face is made bare he that loved thee shall hate.
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.
~Thomas Hardy

He who would see must be himself unseen.
~Lord Byron, The Corsair

~Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principals. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

~Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining indiviual profit without individual responsibility.

~Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
~Ambrose Bierce

When a man resolves to avenge himself, he should first of all tear out the heart from his breast.
~Alexander Dumas

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

Pleasure is spread through the earth,
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
~William Wordsworth

What's the earth
With all its art, verse, music, worth—
Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?
~Robert Browning

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
~John Keats

Life as a whole expresses itself as a force that is not to be contained in any one part.
~Goethe

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
~Goethe

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
~John Milton, Areopagitica

All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.
~John Milton, Paradise Lost

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..
~John Milton, Paradise Lost

Tempest-tossed souls, wherever ye may be, under whatsoever conditions ye may live, know this in the ocean of life the isles of Blessedness are smiling, and the sunny shore of your ideal awaits your coming. Keep your hand firmly upon the helm of thought. In the bark of your soul reclines the commanding Master; He does but sleep: wake Him. Self-control is strength; Right Thought is mastery; Calmness is power. Say unto your heart, "Peace, be still!"
~James Allen

Charles:
Can you suppose me so dead to all good feeling, so utterly lost to honourable impulses, as to eject from my heart her who has possession of it entirely, on such ground as this?

Henry:
You would be justified.

Charles:
Coldly justified in prudence I might be. There are a thousand circumstances in which a man may be justified in a particular course of action, and that course yet may be neither honourable nor just. I love Flora; and were she tormented by the whole of the supernatural world, I should still love her! Nay, it becomes, then, a higher and nobler duty on my part to stand between her and those evils, if possible!
~James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampire

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
~Bram Stoker

We learn from failure, not from success!
~Bram Stoker, Dracula

Listen to them - children of the night. What music they make.
~Bram Stoker, Dracula

"..in the discovery of crimes, there is something much more valuable than the examination of facts, than observations, deductions, inferences and all that stuff and nonsense. What I mean is, as I said before, intuition ... intuition and intelligence.... And Arsène Lupin, without boasting, is deficient in neither one nor the other!...”
~The Confessions of Arene Lupin, Maurice Lablanc

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
~Henry James

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
~Henry James

Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.
~Henry James

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
~Robert Frost

“It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
~C.S. Lewis

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
~C.S. Lewis

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Not all those who wander are lost.
~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.
~J.R.R. Tolkien

Pleasure to me is wonder-— the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.
~H.P. Lovecraft

We may guess that in dreams, life, matter and vitality as the earth knows such things are not necessary constant; and that time and space do not exist as our awakening selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life and that our vain presence on the terra quis globe is itself the secondary, or merely virtual phenomenon.
~H.P. Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep

I know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.
~Agatha Christie, Hallowe'en Party

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
~Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
~Ray Bradbury

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.
~Ray Bradbury

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.
~Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.
~Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.
~Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned

Choices have to be made before there are none left. 

~Sandstorm

Ringing your hands only stops you from rolling up your sleeves!

~Black Order

You think of yourself as an "individual person", with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is an illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between- these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled.
~Douglas Preston, Blasphemy

Once again, we shall have to operate not only outside the box, but outside the room containing the box.
~Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Pendergast Series

Rule number one of crime scene work: If it's wet and sticky and it ain't yours, don't touch it.
~Beverly Connor, Dead Guilty