# Lucy Levine

> Book quotes, reading lists, and notes on art and music.


## Posts

- [Leo Tolstoy Quotes From War and Peace, Anna Karenina and More](https://lucylevine.com/leo-tolstoy-quotes/): 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.
- [Edgar Allan Poe Quotes, From the Tales and Poems](https://lucylevine.com/edgar-allan-poe-quotes/): 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.
- [Emily Dickinson Quotes: Lines From Her Poems](https://lucylevine.com/emily-dickinson-quotes/): 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.
- [Henry David Thoreau Quotes From Walden and Beyond](https://lucylevine.com/henry-david-thoreau-quotes/): 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.
- [Mark Twain Quotes, Checked Against His Books](https://lucylevine.com/mark-twain-quotes/): 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.
- [Oscar Wilde Quotes Beyond Dorian Gray: The Plays, Essays and Letters](https://lucylevine.com/oscar-wilde-quotes/): 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.
- [Did Mark Twain Say "The Two Most Important Days in Your Life"?](https://lucylevine.com/twain-two-most-important-days-quote/): 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.
- [Did Oscar Wilde Say "Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Already Taken"?](https://lucylevine.com/wilde-be-yourself-quote/): 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.
- [Did Frederick Douglass Say "Once You Learn to Read, You Will Be Forever Free"?](https://lucylevine.com/douglass-forever-free-quote/): 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.
- [Did Kahlil Gibran Write "Do Not Live Half a Life"?](https://lucylevine.com/gibran-half-a-life-quote/): 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.
- [Ex Libris: A Short History of the Bookplate](https://lucylevine.com/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 started collecting the labels themselves.
- [A Short History of Reading Aloud](https://lucylevine.com/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 and why it faded.
- [Jane Eyre: The Novel vs the Film Adaptations](https://lucylevine.com/jane-eyre-book-vs-film/): 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 keep, cut and change, scene by scene.
- [Classic Novels Under 200 Pages](https://lucylevine.com/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 reputation in so few pages.
- [Novels Set in Bookshops and Libraries](https://lucylevine.com/novels-set-in-bookshops/): Stories that happen among the shelves: secondhand shops, closed libraries and the people who run them. A reading list with what each book does with its setting.
- [Operas Based on Novels](https://lucylevine.com/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 to fit a story into an evening of singing.
- [How Vermeer Painted Light](https://lucylevine.com/vermeer-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 Vermeer's handful of paintings get their light, looked at one by one.
- [The Starry Night: What Van Gogh Painted and Why](https://lucylevine.com/starry-night-meaning/): 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 Van Gogh's letters say about it, and what they do not.
- [Gogol's Strangest Sentences: The Nose, The Overcoat and Dead Souls](https://lucylevine.com/gogol-strange-quotes/): 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 each comes from.
- [The Strangest Lines in Moby-Dick](https://lucylevine.com/moby-dick-strange-quotes/): 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 the chapter and what Melville is doing.
- [Book Quotes About Friendship](https://lucylevine.com/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 line and where.
- [Book Quotes About Time](https://lucylevine.com/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 madeleine, each line cited to its chapter.
- [The Brontë Sisters' Best Lines: Charlotte, Emily and Anne](https://lucylevine.com/bronte-sisters-quotes/): Three sisters, one parsonage, and very different novels. The lines worth knowing from Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with the chapter each comes from.
- [Charles Dickens Quotes, With the Chapter Each One Comes From](https://lucylevine.com/charles-dickens-quotes/): Dickens's best lines are funnier and sharper in their scenes. Quotes from Great Expectations, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities, each with its chapter and who says it.
- [Ekphrasis: When Poems Describe Paintings](https://lucylevine.com/ekphrasis-poems-about-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 that the eye passes over.
- [Marginalia: Why Readers Write in Books](https://lucylevine.com/marginalia-history/): Some of the best criticism ever written is in the margins. The history of writing in books, the famous annotators, and the case for doing it.
- [A Short History of the Commonplace Book](https://lucylevine.com/commonplace-book-history/): Before quote sites, readers copied lines into a notebook by hand. Where the habit came from, how readers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson used it, and how to start one.
- [Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" and the Novel Behind It](https://lucylevine.com/kate-bush-wuthering-heights/): 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, and what it leaves out.
- [Songs That Quote Literature](https://lucylevine.com/songs-that-quote-books/): Songwriters who lift from poems and novels, sometimes openly and sometimes not. The source behind each song, named.
- [Albums Named After Books](https://lucylevine.com/albums-inspired-by-books/): Records that borrow a title, a character or a whole plot from literature. What each album takes from the book, and how closely it follows it.
- [How to Look at a Painting: A Slow Method](https://lucylevine.com/how-to-look-at-a-painting/): Most museum visitors spend seconds per painting. A simple order for looking longer: distance, light, edges, then subject, and what each step tends to reveal.
- [The Great Wave Off Kanagawa: What Hokusai's Print Is Really Showing](https://lucylevine.com/great-wave-meaning/): Look past the wave and there are three boats and a small Mount Fuji. How the print was made, why there are many copies, and what the composition does to your eye.
- [Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism: How to Tell Them Apart](https://lucylevine.com/impressionism-vs-post-impressionism/): Monet painted light; Cézanne, Van Gogh and Seurat each went somewhere else with it. The differences in brushwork, colour and intent, with the paintings to look at.
- [Pride and Prejudice: The Book vs the Film Adaptations](https://lucylevine.com/pride-and-prejudice-book-vs-film/): The 1995 series, the 2005 film and the novel tell the same story with different heroines. Which scenes each adaptation adds, cuts or changes, and what that does to Elizabeth.
- [How to Build a Personal Book Collection Worth Keeping](https://lucylevine.com/how-to-build-a-book-collection/): A collection is a set of choices, not a pile of books. How to pick a focus, what makes an edition worth owning, and how to keep a shelf from turning into storage.
- [Books About Music and Musicians](https://lucylevine.com/books-about-music/): Novels and nonfiction that make you hear the music on the page. A shelf for anyone who reads liner notes.
- [Novels About Painters and Paintings](https://lucylevine.com/novels-about-painters/): From Zola's The Masterpiece to Woolf's Lily Briscoe, novels that put a painter at the centre and take the work seriously. What each one gets right about making art.
- [Kafka's Most Unsettling Lines, and Where They Come From](https://lucylevine.com/kafka-strange-quotes/): The Metamorphosis opens with a man waking up as an insect and treats it as a scheduling problem. Kafka's flattest, strangest sentences, and what they are doing in context.
- [Alice in Wonderland's Oddest Lines, Explained](https://lucylevine.com/alice-in-wonderland-weird-quotes/): Carroll's nonsense has rules. The strangest lines in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the chapter each comes from, and the logic joke underneath.
- [The Strangest Sentences in Classic Literature](https://lucylevine.com/weirdest-quotes-classic-literature/): Serious novels contain some very strange sentences. A collection of the oddest, from Sterne to Dickens to Melville, with the context that explains, or fails to explain, each one.
- [Quotes About Reading and Books, From the Books Themselves](https://lucylevine.com/quotes-about-reading/): Many famous "quotes about reading" have no source anyone can find. These ones do: what novelists actually wrote about reading, with the book and chapter.
- [Book Quotes About the Sea](https://lucylevine.com/book-quotes-about-the-sea/): From Moby-Dick to The Awakening, the sea in literature is rarely just water. The lines that make the point, cited to the chapter.
- [Book Quotes About Solitude](https://lucylevine.com/book-quotes-about-solitude/): Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville and the Brontës on being alone, which is not always the same thing as being lonely. Each line with its book and chapter.
- [Virginia Woolf Quotes From Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse](https://lucylevine.com/virginia-woolf-quotes/): Woolf's sentences are hard to cut down to a quote without losing the turn in the middle. The lines that survive it, with the section of each novel they come from.
- [Oscar Wilde's Best Lines From The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Context](https://lucylevine.com/oscar-wilde-dorian-gray-quotes/): Most of the novel's famous epigrams belong to Lord Henry, and the book does not take his side. Who says each line, in which chapter, and what happens next.
- [Jane Austen Quotes, With the Chapter Each One Comes From](https://lucylevine.com/jane-austen-quotes/): Austen's best lines are funnier in context. The quotes worth knowing from Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, each with its chapter, so you can read the scene it comes from.

## Pages

- [Lucy's Book Quote Collection](https://lucylevine.com/quotes/): Lines Lucy Levine has saved from her reading: Brookner, Murakami, Shafak, Cunningham, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and more, each with the book it came from.
- [Do Not Sell My Info](https://lucylevine.com/do-not-sell-my-info/): Lucy Levine respects your privacy rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and similar state privacy laws.
- [Editorial Policy](https://lucylevine.com/editorial-policy/): Quotations in Lucy Levine's articles are copied from the text of the book and cited to the work and chapter.
- [Disclaimer](https://lucylevine.com/disclaimer/): The information on lucylevine.com is for general informational purposes only.
- [Terms of Service](https://lucylevine.com/terms-of-service/): By using lucylevine.com, you agree to these terms.
- [Meet The Author](https://lucylevine.com/about-the-author/): Lucy Levine writes about books, art and music.
- [All Essays And Quote Collections](https://lucylevine.com/all-essays/): Every essay, quote collection and review on the site, newest first.
- [Book Quotes](https://lucylevine.com/book-quotes/): Quote collections, reading lists, and essays on books, art and music, newest first.
- [Contact](https://lucylevine.com/contact/): Spotted a misquote, want to suggest a book, or just want to say hello? Write to Lucy here.
- [About](https://lucylevine.com/about/): Book quotes, reading lists, and criticism of books, art and music.
- [Home](https://lucylevine.com/)
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