quotage

[burntcopper]

Pondering what the most quoted books/plays are. (no, we're not including speeches or declarations of independence-type things. Works of fiction.)

Shakespeare is a no-brainer. The amount of words he made up, not to mention phrases that entered the english language (sitting through hamlet your first time is an education).
Alice in Wonderland gets quoted a lot, normally consciously but in a lot of cases, it's become the stock phrase of description ('Down the rabbit hole', 'curiouser and curiouser').
Pratchett is quoted a lot in my circle of mates, but then we're all geeks.

Any others you can think of? Specifically ones that entered the common language.

Comments

[stu-n.livejournal.com]

Oscar Wilde is an obvious one.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Aesop, I guess, though in a way that's the ideas as much as specific expressions of them.

The Authorized Version - not the Bible as such, but that particular translation is full of phrases that get quoted.

The Importance of Being Earnest.

Casablanca.

Oh, and Pope.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Does the Bible count as fiction? Eye for an eye, turn the other cheek etc.

Do screenplays count as plays? In that case Monty Python's Flying Circus is rather often and widely quoted.

[andromakie.livejournal.com]

"We're not in Kansas anymore" though technically I think the line is only from the movie.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

Are you including poetry? Because if so, things like Tennyson - 'Tis better to have loved and lost' - and Keats - 'Beauty is truth; truth, beauty' are pretty well-known. Also, in some circles, Gilbert and Sullivan (mostly Gilbert, I fancy) - 'I've got a little list'; 'What, never? Well, hardly ever!'; 'adding verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.' Mind you, my father and I tend to converse in quotations a lot of the time, so my findings may be skewed.

You're right about Hamlet, though; it's probably the most-quoted work after the KJV Bible. If we're leaving out 'deliberate' quotations I'd guess that it would come out ahead.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Look at your icon!

Chaucer: specifically Canterbury Tales.

'He was a verray parfit gentil knight.'

'Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was.'

'But every thyng which schyneth as the gold, Nis nat gold, as that I have herd it told.'

'Therefore it behooveth hire a full long spoon That shal ete with a feend.'

'One eare it heard, at the other out it went.'

'Mordre wol out, that see we day by day.'

'Thanne is it wysdom, as thynketh me, To maken vertu of necessite'

'Many a smale maketh a grate.'

'Felds hath eyen, and wode have eres.'

'So was hir jolly whistel wel y-wette.'

'Frieth in his own grease.'

'And for to se, and eek for to be seye.'

'For thre may kepe a counsel, if twain be awaie.'

'Ther n' is no werkman whatever he be, That may both werken wel and hastily.'

- but also Troilus and Criseyde:

'For of Fortune's sharpe adversite, The worste kynde of infortune is this, A man to hav bent in prosperite, And it remembren whan it passed is.'

'It is not good a sleping hound to wake.'

'Of harmes two the less is for to chose.'

- as well as a few other well-known ones:

'She lovede Right fro the firste sighte.'

'Love is blynde.'

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Similar vintage, different country: the Commedia Divina

[animeartistjo.livejournal.com]

Jane Austen's P&P is quoted a bit. Or it's just variations of the first line, "It's widely known that every blahblah is in search of a blahblah."

Heeee~~ Pratchett FTW! My sister and I quote him to each other all the time! Unfortunately, this being America and my peers being all engineers or science majors, no one else I know has read his books. Woe.

[xenaclone.livejournal.com]

John Donne: And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Wordsworth

Fairy stories

A handbag...?

Noel Coward: Terribly flat, Norfolk...

The Rubaiat of Omar Kayam: A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou...

Douglas Adams: 42. Almost but not entirely unlike tea. I've got pains in the diodes all down my left side. Oh, no; not again...

Monty Python [does tv count?]

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

'No man is an island' isn't from a work of fiction, though; it's from a sermon.

[hypolimnion.livejournal.com]

Second on the John Donne, he ain't my specialty but I see him around sometimes. 'No man is an island' is his. Similarly I suspect bits of mangled Blake turn up in common speech but have no proof at present.

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride - I don't remember his phrasings exactly except that neither of them are the modern variants but it's the source of 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' and the bit about music soothing the savage breast.

Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress - 'If there were world enough, and time', and also I've seen 'The grave's a fine and private place' out of context more than once.

[tirinar.livejournal.com]

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven if you're counting poetry. Or maybe that's my circle of goths.

[mrmrsmith.livejournal.com]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes gets misquoted a lot.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Another one is Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm: "Something nasty in the woodshed". Someone else suggested Douglas Adams - I actually came across the phrase through Adams (it was before I'd read Gibbons).

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

as others have said, are we including things that were made into films/TV/radio? E.g. Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, Bladerunner, Dr.Seuss, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?

and when you say "most quoted" ... does one line quoted 100 times mean more or less than ten different lines quoted ten times?

There are some single lines that get (mis)quoted a lot (quite often from the start or end of a book) "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man ...", "reader I married him", "call me Ishmael" etc.

For a more meta answer, I have the dictionary of Cultural Literacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy) somewhere in my collection which gives thousands of entries to things that you should know as a member of a western society in order to understand cultural references ("play it again Sam", "down the rabbit hole", "tortoise vs hare", "beam me up Scotty" etc.) and there are plenty of references to literary (fiction) works in there.

But I don't know which are most quoted by the population as a whole ... my friends are more likely to quote Pratchett or Douglas Adams than Bacon or Austen.