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.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-09-25 06:00 pm (UTC)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.