Literary musings

Today I'm inspired to share great quotes by famous authors, but not the quotes that most people know.

I started reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol this morning. It will be a quick read before the holidays and I can get another book in this month. And while I'm familiar with the story (who isn't, really?), I've never read the book. As I started it, I realized it's been awhile since I've read Dickens at all. In fact, I think the last time I read anything by him was also the first time -- Great Expectations my freshman year of high school. I really enjoyed that book. Anyway, I wasn't two paragraphs into the book today (literally), when I was laughing out loud. Let me share with you what I enjoyed:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

I'm not the only one who finds this amusing, am I? On that same note, am I the only one besides Dickens who actually thinks about things like that? I mean really, what is so dead about a door-nail? And all the other "similes" as he calls them, clichés as we call them...where do they get their origins? Throwing the baby out with the bath water? Who does that?

Okay, I'll calm down now. I have one other literary quote to share that had made me laugh out loud upon stumbling across it. This is from C.S. Lewis, in The Magician's Nephew. This one is funny because it is also -- unfortunately -- true. It's much shorter...here it is:

"... the trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."

Now tell me that is neither funny nor true. You can't, because it is both. I've only read that book once, and it was a few years ago, but the moment I read that line, it became one of my favorite all-time quotes. It's very unique.

Do you have any favorite literary quotes or passages that are from well-known authors, but the words themselves are not so widely recognized? Please share.