Books on the Wall blog posts featuring books quotes in either graphical or deep dive format.
Published between 1868 and 1869, Little Women follows four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—as they journey together from childhood to womanhood during the U.S. Civil War period. Louisa May Alcott’s novel was an immediate success upon publication, a quality that it has continued to enjoy ever since. Though aimed primarily for young women, Little Women has been embraced by diverse audiences worldwide and has been adapted into several films, TV productions and Broadway shows.
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This quote is one of the most poignant lines in all of William Shakespeare’s works. It comes from Othello’s final tragic monologue, spoken as he realizes that he has murdered his faithful wife, Desdemona, on the basis of uncontrollable jealousy and false information. The full name of William Shakespeare’s play is The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice. Believed to have been published around 1603, Othello remains popular today for its rich characters and themes of love, racism and revenge. Check out the full-text of Othello for free on Project Gutenberg.
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This quote comes from All the Pretty Horses, winner of the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Published in 1992, All the Pretty Horses is the first installation of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. The novel follows two teenage boys from Texas, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, who travel south into Mexico to become cowboys. Written in McCarthy’s distinct style of sparse yet sprawling, simple yet profound stream-of-consciousness prose, All the Pretty Horses is at once romantic, humorous, tragic and deeply philosophical. Cormac McCarthy is renowned for other works including The Orchard Keeper, Blood Meridian and The […]
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This quote comes from his most recent work, This is How You Lose Her. The works of Junot Diaz center around young Dominican American men and their families, some of whom have immigrated to the United States and some of whom remain back home on the island. Incorporating Dominican history, English and Spanish slang, ghosts, and nerd-pop culture, Diaz’s works examine universal questions of identity, heritage and love with a uniquely fresh voice.
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Today’s quote comes from Walden, one of Henry David Thoreau’s most famous works. First published in 1854, Walden is a literary reflection on Thoreau’s purposeful time in solitude in the woods near his family home. Walden is often viewed as the seminal work in American transcendentalist philosophy, contemplating themes like solitude, self-reliance and simplicity. To read the whole work, along with Civil Disobedience, check out our full-text Walden poster.
Continue ReadingMore commonly known simply as Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is one of William Shakespeare’s most famous works. The play follows the lives and deaths of Romeo and Juliet, two young star-crossed lovers from feuding families in Verona. Romeo and Juliet’s love is one of the most beloved, and tragic, in all of classic literature. But though it’s possibly the most famous love story ever written, many of its quotes are difficult to remember and hard to place within the larger context of the story. Who said “But loft! What light through yonder window breaks?” Besides […]
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This quote comes from Donna Tartt’s early work, The Secret History. Published in 1992 when Tartt was only 28 years old, The Secret History follows a close-knit and extremely exclusive group of friends who study classics at an elite liberal arts college in New England. Filled with classical allusions, mystery, melodrama and the occult, The Secret History is a dark, engaging and philosophical work. In 2014, Donna Tartt received the Pulitzer Prize for her bildungsroman-style epic novel The Goldfinch, despite some notable criticism from the upper echelons of the literary world.
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Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is set in the West Egg, a fictional neighborhood on Long Island. The novel follows narrator Nick Carraway as he becomes entangled in the drama of the West Egg socialites including, above all, the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. Through grand affairs, intrigue and tragedy, The Great Gatsby explores the opulence, morality, society and decline of both the Roaring Twenties and the American Dream. Though many original reviewers condemned the novel as a decline from earlier works like This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, it is The Great Gatsby that has continued to solidify F. Scott Fitzgerald’s place in […]
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This quote comes from David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon,” published in the 2004 collection Oblivion: Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories 2002. “Good Old Neon” is posthumously narrated by Neal, an attractive and apparently successful American businessman who committed suicide by crashing his car. In a simple first-person monologue, Neal expresses his lifelong emotional torment at his self-proclaimed fraudulence and inability to ever be authentic. “Good Old Neon” devastatingly explores what it means to be authentic or lonely or successful or empty—or all of these at once. Like much of Wallace’s work, “Good Old Neon” peers into […]
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The first post of our new weekly feature, Words Wednesday, spotlights Salman Rushdie, one of our favorite contemporary authors. This quote comes from Salman Rushdie’s highly acclaimed and hugely controversial work The Satanic Verses. First published in 1988, the novel opens as two Indian expatriate friends, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall from the sky after surviving a plane bombing. The two friends land on earth magically transformed into the archangel Gibreel and the devil himself. The novel follows the two characters as their new lives both diverge and intersect. Moving fluidly between plots spanning thousands of years, The Satanic Verses […]
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