Every essay, quote collection and review on the site, newest first.
Did Mark Twain Say “The Two Most Important Days in Your Life”?
Twain attracts more misattributions than almost any writer. This line is not in his books. What a search of his collected works shows, and…
Did Oscar Wilde Say “Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Already Taken”?
It is the most-shared Wilde line online, and it does not appear in his published works. How we checked, what Wilde actually wrote about…
Did Frederick Douglass Say “Once You Learn to Read, You Will Be Forever Free”?
The line is on library walls and classroom posters. It is not in Douglass's Narrative. What he really wrote about learning to read, quoted…
Did Kahlil Gibran Write “Do Not Live Half a Life”?
The poem is shared everywhere under Gibran's name and often credited to The Prophet. It is not in The Prophet. What the 1923 text…
Ex Libris: A Short History of the Bookplate
A small printed label that says whose book this is, and often much more. Where bookplates came from, what they show, and why collectors…
A Short History of Reading Aloud
For most of history, reading meant reading out loud. From monastery refectories to Dickens's public readings and Victorian family evenings, how the habit worked…
Jane Eyre: The Novel vs the Film Adaptations
Every film of Jane Eyre has to decide what to do with a first-person narrator who argues with the reader. What the major adaptations…
Classic Novels Under 200 Pages
Great books that take an evening or a weekend, not a month. Short classics from Melville to Woolf, with why each one earns its…
Novels Set in Bookshops and Libraries
Stories that happen among the shelves: secondhand shops, closed libraries and the people who run them. A reading list with what each book does…
Operas Based on Novels
Carmen, La Traviata, Eugene Onegin and more began as novels or novellas. What each composer took from the book, and what had to go…
How Vermeer Painted Light
Light from a window on the left, a wall that is never quite white, and small dots of paint that read as gleam. How…
The Starry Night: What Van Gogh Painted and Why
Painted from memory at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, with a village that was not in his view. What is actually on the canvas, what…
Gogol’s Strangest Sentences: The Nose, The Overcoat and Dead Souls
A nose that leaves its owner's face and gets promoted above him. Gogol's most absurd lines, in public-domain translations, with the story or chapter…
The Strangest Lines in Moby-Dick
A whaling novel that stops for sermons, cetology lectures and a chapter on the whiteness of a whale. The oddest sentences in Moby-Dick, with…
Book Quotes About Friendship
Friendship gets fewer famous lines than love, and better ones. Quotes about friends from Austen, Montgomery, Twain, Dumas and others, with who says each…
Book Quotes About Time
Stopped clocks, lost years and the hour that will not come. What novelists and poets wrote about time, from Dickens's Miss Havisham to Proust's…
Ekphrasis: When Poems Describe Paintings
Keats on an urn, Auden on Brueghel, Williams on the same Brueghel. What ekphrasis is, and what a poem can see in a painting…
Marginalia: Why Readers Write in Books
Some of the best criticism ever written is in the margins. The history of writing in books, the famous annotators, and the case for…
A Short History of the Commonplace Book
Before quote sites, readers copied lines into a notebook by hand. Where the habit came from, how readers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson…
Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and the Novel Behind It
Kate Bush wrote it as a teenager, singing as Cathy's ghost at the window. Which scene of Emily Brontë's novel the song comes from,…
Songs That Quote Literature
Songwriters who lift from poems and novels, sometimes openly and sometimes not. The source behind each song, named.