"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)