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

[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.