Classics (aka books I had to read for school) are simultaneously the best and worst of fictional books. I have such ambivalent feelings towards classics- I absolutely hate having to read them, but while I'm reading them, or after I'm done, my entire perspective on life shifts just a little. Below is my list of compelling classics.
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“When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies.”
“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
“Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.”
1984 by George Orwell
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”
“Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.”
“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
“I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.”
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”