'K. kept feeling that he had lost himself, or was further away in a strange land than anyone had ever been before' A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats - this is the setting for Kafka's story about a man seeking both acceptance in the village and access to the castle.  Meer

'I liv'd indeed like a Queen; or if you will have me confess, that my Condition had still the Reproach of a Whore, I may say, I was sure, the Queen of Whores.  Meer

Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away! Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion.  Meer

"It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.  Meer

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'I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.' Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) was Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, and it contains some of the best examples of his talent as a writer of short fiction.  Meer

'Who would you say knows himself?' In 399 BCE Socrates was tried in Athens on charges of irreligion and corruption of the young, convicted, and sentenced to death.  Meer

'No matter which way you look at us, you'll find that we're in all respects; Remarkably wasp-like in our habits, in every aspect of our lives.' Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, an exuberant form of festival drama which flourished in Athens during the fifth century BCE.  Meer

'Among his associates no one loved him, many disliked him, and more feared him.' Father Schedoni is enlisted by the imperious Marchesa di Vivaldi to prevent her son from marrying the beautiful Ellena.  Meer

'Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!' The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction.  Meer

'The memory of a particular image is only regret for a particular moment.  Meer

'There's something of everything there, the best and the worst, the vulgar and the sublime, flowers, muck, tears, laughter, the river of life itself' Pascal Rougon has served as a doctor in the rural French town of Plassans for thirty years.  Meer

'To die will be an awfully big adventure.' Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children's literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living in secret with the birds and fairies in the middle of London, but as the children for whom he invented the stories grew older, so too did Peter, reappearing in Neverland, where he was aided in his epic battles by the motherly and resourceful Wendy Darling.  Meer

To know when to let things alone is a high pitch of good sense. George Savile, Marquess of Halifax was among the greatest statesmen of late seventeenth-century England and was a central figure in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Meer

'The Queen and the bat had been talking a good deal that afternoon.  Meer

'I really don't understand how people can blame a priest so much, when he strays from the path.' The Sin of Abbé Mouret tells the compelling story of the young priest Serge Mouret.  Meer

'Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!' The mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Dartmoor in the most famous of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's books.  Meer

'If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: "To fight against Fascism," and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency.  Meer

'Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think!' H.  Meer

'You said I killed you - haunt me, then!' Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous love stories in the English language. It is also one of the most potent revenge narratives.  Meer