Relevant AS Quotes (Novels)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit -- Jeanette Winterson 
+  "I love you almost as much as I love the Lord."
+  "I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed."
+  "These children of God have fallen foul of their lusts."
+  "She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies."
+  "As long as I have known them, my mother has gone to bed at four, and my father has got up at five. That was nice in a way because it meant that I could come down in the middle of the night and not be lonely."

The Bluest Eye -- Toni Morrison
+  "Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe."
+  "To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane."
+  "She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit."
+  "Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.'"
+  "What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter?... How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that?"
+  "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."

Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
+  "She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."
+  "The frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our [HH and Annabel] actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh."
+  "I broke her [Annabel's] spell by incarnating her in another."
+  "I knew that I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not forever be Lolita." 
+  "Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat."
+  "I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one."
+  Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.

The Millstone -- Margaret Drabble
+  "Lucky in work, unlucky in love. Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence, as Byron mistakenly remarked." ["Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love."]
+  "But I was not dead, I was alive twice over."
+  "I sat there looking at her... what I felt it is pointless to try to describe. Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life."
+  "'All women feel exactly that, it's nothing to be proud of, it isn't even worth thinking about.'"

Disgrace -- J.M. Coetzee
+  "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."
+  "It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman's company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage." 
+  "He existed in an anxious flurry of promiscuity."
+  He claims to be a "servant of Eros".
+  "Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it."
+  "He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive."
+  "Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core."

Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
+  "At the end they decided, as everybody knew they would, that the girl should go to Ogbuefi Udo to replace his murdered wife."
+  "Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper."
+  "But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you."
+  I will not have a son who cannot hold up his head in the gathering of the clan. I would sooner strangle him with my own hands.” [Achebe presents Okonkwo's love for his family and for his clan as incompatible.]
+  "'Our fathers never dreamed of such a thing, they never killed their brothers. But a white man never came to them. So we must do what our fathers would never have done.'"