Famous Quotes

Question: From what play does the phrase "Alas, poor Yorick" come?

Answer: In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet the Prince of Denmark makes a speech that begins, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

Question: What book begins, "How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago"?

Answer: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was an exposé of the Soviet prison system. It was published in 1973.

Question: This Shakespeare character said, "To be, or not to be".

Answer: The famous soliloquy that begins, "To be or not to be / That is the question," comes from the play Hamlet, written about 1600.

Question: What is the motto of the Three Musketeers?

Answer: The Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas’s novel of that title live by the motto, "All for one, one for all!"

Question: Who wrote the lines "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"?

Answer: Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese, a book in which the lines “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” appear.

Question: What poem begins with the line “April is the cruelest month”?

Answer: “April is the cruelest month” is the first line of "The Waste Land," a highly influential poem by T.S. Eliot. It was published in 1922 and has become a classic modernist work.

Question: From what book does the phrase "tilting at windmills" come?

Answer: In the book by that name, Don Quixote confused windmills for giants carrying swords, and he rushed off to fight them with his lance.