Books to discover: Classics

Emily Brontë

1801.-I have just returned from a visit to my landlord-the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

Lewis Carroll

ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

Albert Camus

The Stranger demanded of Camus the creation of a style at once literary and profoundly popular, an artistic sleight of hand that would make the complexities of a man’s life appear simple.

William Shakespeare

It is cold; and it is midnight.

Niccolò Machiavelli

ALL states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities.

H. G. Wells

Wells uses first-person narration in The War of the Worlds.

Charles Dickens

MY FATHER'S FAMILY NAME being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Near everyone agreed Mary Lennox was a most disagreeable child.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak and studded with iron spikes.

Charles Dickens

It was about twenty years after I first started Pickwick Papers before I could honestly claim to have finished it.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the 'Admiral Benbow' inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

Vatsyāyana

IT may be interesting to some persons to learn how it came about that Vatsyayana was first brought to light and translated into the English language.

Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Jack London

BUCK did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

Лев Толстой

ALL happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.