You’ve come to the right place, you badass (and curious) writer! Here are the answers to the Banned Book Quote Quiz:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. 
– 1984 by George Orwell

“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
– A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one’…. (The man who first said that) was probably a coward…. He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”
– A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
– Animal Farm by George Orwell

“It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”
– As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
– Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
– Beloved by Toni Morrison

“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
– Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

“In the sudden, brief silence, she heard something within her turn over. Perhaps only her soul.”
– Carrie by Stephen King

“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
– Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

“Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.”
― Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

“Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
― Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

apple – wisdom – lethargy – history
-American Heritage and Merriam-Webster dictionaries

“It’s strange, but when it comes right down to it I never do fall apart–even when I’m sure I will.”
– Forever by Judy Blume

“I wanted to tell him that I will never be sorry for loving him. That in a way I still do – that maybe I always will. I’ll never regret one single thing we did together because what we had was very special. Maybe if we were ten years older it would have worked out differently. Maybe.”
– Forever by Judy Blume

“Do you think you can wait – because I don’t want you to stop loving me. I keep remembering us and how it was. I don’t want to hurt you…not ever…”
– Forever by Judy Blume

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
– Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time.”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

“Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.”
– Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

“Sometimes I feel like my brain is a machine built by someone who lost the instruction manual.”
– Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

“I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”
– Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

“I wonder if when you dream about somebody they dream about you.”
-Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

“Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.”
– In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
– Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

“Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.”
– James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

“There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

“You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.”
– Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

“Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible.”
– Native Son by Richard Wright

“I don’t know what you think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together. But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what’s the point of butter without bread? (Why are all these examples of FOODS?!!?!?!?!?!?!) Anyway by myself I’m nothing special. But with you I could be.”
– Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

“I don’t know what you think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together. But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what’s the point of butter without bread? (Why are all these examples of FOODS?!!?!?!?!?!?!) Anyway by myself I’m nothing spe
– Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoultcial. But with you I could be.”

“A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”
– Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

“If you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.”
– One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”
– Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

“His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed.”
-Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“If you’re good at it, and you like it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”
-The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”
– The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the four hugest words in the world when they’re put together. You can do it.
– The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.”
– The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
– The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

“It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened- Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many.”
– The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

“I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”
– The Awakening by Kate Chopin

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”
– The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
– The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

“But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.”
– The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.”
– The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

“When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.”
– The Call of the Wild by Jack London

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
– The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

″‘Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.‘” ‘Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.’ Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”
– The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes….If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”
– The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

“‘A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.’ ‘What can she become?’ I asked. ‘Why, she said, the mother of his children.’ ‘But I am not the mother of anybody’s children,’ I said, and I am something.’”
– The Color Purple by Alice Walker

“I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.”
– The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”
– The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing.”
– The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
– The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
– The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
– The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

“At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”
– The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“I can’t change where I come from or what I’ve been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”
– The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“That’s the problem. We let people say stuff, and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?”
– The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“Once you’ve seen how broken someone is it’s like seeing them naked—you can’t look at them the same anymore.”
– The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared.”
– The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“You can destroy wood and brick, but you can’t destroy a movement.”
– The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“And then he gives me a smile that just seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me.”
– The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

“The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.”
– The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / nothing is going to get better – it’s not.”
– The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

“I’ve been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green. When you’re a kid everything’s new, dawn. It’s just when you get used to everything that it’s day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep that way, it’s a good way to be.”
– The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

“It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.”
– The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

“So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”
– The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
– The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
– The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
– To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

“The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.”
– To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

“O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.”
– 12th Night by William Shakespeare

“Things are not magical because they’ve been conjured for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them.”
– Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

“This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident… something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn’t see it, didn’t realize… and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn’t a normal town anymore.”
– Welcome to the Dead House by R.L. Stine (#1 in the Goosebumps series)

“And [he] sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot”
-Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Got a suggestion for a banned book? Email me at howtowritelikeabadass@gmail.com.