"A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury

“It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’s mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?”

("A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury)

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

"So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed. He came from hot plowshares to prospects of clover tranquilly, and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars faded as flowers."

(The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, chapter 24)

The American by Henry James

"But it has nothing to do with you personally; it's what you represent."

(The American by Henry James, chapter III)

"The Haunted Boy" by Carson McCullers

"Hugh stood in the darkening yard after the sunset colors faded in the west and the wisteria was dark purple. The kitchen light was on and he saw his mother fixing dinner. He knew that something was finished; the terror was far from him now, also the anger that had bounced with love, he dread and guilt."

("The Haunted Boy" by Carson McCullers)

“Searching for Summer” by Joan Aiken

“It was years since the bombs had been banned, but still the cloud never lifted. Whitish gray, day after day, sometimes darkening to a weeping slate color or, at the end of an evening, turning to smoky copper, the sky endlessly, secretively brooded.”

(“Searching for Summer” by Joan Aiken)

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

"Yet absence implies presence, absence is not non-existence."

(A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, chapter XIX)

“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good—no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.”

(“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."

("Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...."

(The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, chapter IX)

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

"A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheatlands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom."

(Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, chapter 1)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

"Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

(Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, chapter 135)

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

“Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.”

(Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

“There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable.”

(The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Chapter XXX)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”

(Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë)

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”

(The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Chapter 8)

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

“You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

(A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle)