From the most famous first line in Russian fiction to Pierre’s questions about how to live. Tolstoy quotes in public-domain English translations, each with book, part and chapter.
Beyond “Nevermore”: Poe’s most quoted lines from his tales, poems and essays, each found in the text, with what the narrator is doing when he says it.
Dickinson compressed whole arguments into a few lines. The lines people quote, and the poems they come from, as printed in the early public-domain editions.
Thoreau wrote for people who suspect they are living wrong. The essential lines from Walden, Civil Disobedience and Walking, each with the chapter or essay it comes from.
Half the Mark Twain quotes online are not by Mark Twain. These are: lines from Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson and his travel books, each found in the text and cited to the chapter.
Wilde’s best lines are spread across his comedies, essays and De Profundis. Quotes from The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, The Decay of Lying and more, each cited to act or section.
Twain attracts more misattributions than almost any writer. This line is not in his books. What a search of his collected works shows, and the real Twain lines on the same idea.
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 being yourself, and the lines that sound like him because they are his.
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 from his own text, and why the real lines are stronger.
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 actually contains, and what can and cannot be said about where the lines came from.