From a lithub.com post titled “How Many of the 100 Most Famous Passages in Literature Can You Identify?” Try these 12:
1. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
2. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
3. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
4. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
5. I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
6. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
7. Not all who wander are lost.
8. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
9. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.
10. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
11. I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
12. Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
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The author and book:
1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
2. Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
3. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
5. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
6. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
7. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
9. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
10. 1 Corinthians 13:4 in the Bible
11. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
12. Albert Camus, The Stranger
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