love
money
death
love

So now I’m leaving, but I want you to know, Katerina, that the truth is that you love him, and only him.

— The Brothers Karamazov

I tell you what, you make the lady really love you.

— Père Goriot

Headlong into work, wine, love—everything, and I’d fear neither God nor devil!

— Zorba the Greek

The theatres of Leicester Square echoed with songs of love and gaiety, but my heart did not beat in time with them.

— Season of Migration to the North

Yet on the day when I went out there to stay that summer, it was as though that casual pause at my door had left some seed, some minute virulence in this cellar earth of mine quick not for love perhaps (I did not love him; how could I? I had never even heard his voice, had only Ellen’s word for it that there was such a person) and quick not for the spying which you will doubtless call it, which during the past six months between that New Year’s and that June gave substance to that shadow with a name emerging from Ellen’s vain and garrulous folly, that shape without even a face yet because I had not even seen the photograph then, reflected in the secret and bemused gaze of a young girl: because I who had learned nothing of love, not even parents’ love—that fond dear constant violation of privacy, that stultification of the burgeoning and incorrigible  I  which is the meed and due of all mammalian meat, became not mistress, not beloved, but more than even love; I became all polymath love’s androgynous advocate.

— Absalom, Absalom!

A rosy blush

Dyed the boy’s cheeks; he knew not what love was;

But blushes well became him; like the bloom

Of rosy apples hanging in the sun,

Or painted ivory, or when the moon

Glows red beneath her pallor and the gongs

Resound in vain to rescue her eclipse.

— Metamorphoses

He was still in love with ambition.

— The Red and the Black

He returned to this other point of view, which was the opposite of the one based on his love and jealousy and to which he resorted at times by a sort of intellectual equity and in order to make allowance for the various probabilities, and tried to judge Odette as though he had not been in love with her, as though she were like any other woman, as though her life (as soon as he was no longer present) had not been different, woven secretly behind his back, hatched against his will.

— In Search of Lost Time

I myself love ordinary people, I want to love them…

— The Brothers Karamazov

Love her!

— Sons and Lovers

She was fully aware that she had to compete against his love of solitude.

— The Red and the Black

A grain of that in a cup of tea two hours before making love, and afterwards either you’ll be pleased with Arafa or you can chase him away with your curse.

— Children of Gebelawi

“What nonsense, mother—you know I don’t love her—I—I tell you I don’t love her—she doesn’t even walk with my arm, because I don’t want her to.”

— Sons and Lovers

“So it seems, my love, for you have as good as refused the pick of them; and if there’s better to be had, I’m sure there’s no girl better deserves it.”

— Middlemarch

“God bless you, madam!” said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.

— Middlemarch

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, ‘Love her, love her, love her!

— Great Expectations

‘Can you have been in love?’ she said to Yashvin.

— Anna Karenina

He was struck first by the thought that it is not given to man to comprehend divine truths, but it is given to an aggregate of men united by love — the Church.

— Anna Karenina

And in this she was aided by the resentment she now felt in place of her former love for Diotima; for since she was no longer content to have a share in her mistress’s sublime raptures, but was carrying on her own amorous affair, she had changed a great deal.

— The Man Without Qualities

There was a gloomy girl Marion, and there was her stepmother who turned out to be, against all expectations, a young, gray, understanding redhead who explained to Marion that Marion’s dead mother had really been a heroic woman since she had deliberately dissimulated her great love for Marion because she was dying, and did not want her child to miss her.

— Lolita

They were big and strong, but they felt towards him such love as the alley had never known.

— Children of Gebelawi

Of course I was worried about Father, who was so far gone in love that he looked like wrecking the whole family.

— The Man Without Qualities

Maybe while he would sit in his office adding and subtracting the money and adding what they would get out of Sutpen (he was never worried about what Bon would do when he found out; he had probably a long time ago paid Bon that compliment of thinking that even if he was too dull or too indolent to suspect or find out about his father himself, he wasn’t fool enough not to be able to take advantage of it once somebody showed him the proper move; maybe if the thought had ever occurred to him that because of love or honor or anything else under heaven or jurisprudence either, Bon would not, would refuse to, he (the lawyer) would even have furnished proof that he no longer breathed)—maybe all the time it was this that racked him: how to get Bon where he would either have to find it out himself, or where somebody—the father or the mother—would have to tell him. 

— Absalom, Absalom!

One night, Ayooba, who was regressing towards infancy faster than any of them, and had begun to suck his one moveable thumb, saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the delicate rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri-tree to sit swinging from a high branch by her tail: a white wraithlike monkey with the face of his mother visited Ayooba night after night, so that after a time he was obliged to remember more about her than her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry, as though she, too, were simply some sort of thing, simply one of the gifts her father gave to her husband; in the heart of the Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and stopped sucking his thumb.

— Midnight's Children

‘It makes no difference,’ she thought, ‘as long as he’s here, and when he’s here he can’t, he daren’t not love me.’

— Anna Karenina

I love my daughter with one love and her with another.

— Anna Karenina

So why should I love him?

— The Brothers Karamazov

It hurt her most of all, this failure to love him, even when he roused her strong emotions.

— Sons and Lovers

For little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some amiable male, some grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks.

— Lolita

It’s Russia I love, Alexei, and I love the Russian God, although I myself am no good.

— The Brothers Karamazov

You see, Alyosha, I’ve come to love my tears in those five years, to love them terribly…

— The Brothers Karamazov

For, as things are now, I don’t dare love my own children, let alone my fellow men.

— The Brothers Karamazov

To be sure, there was love in her voice; Julien could hear that plainly.

— The Red and the Black
money

The Stefan Zannovich you were learning about, he got so much money he was able to travel to Germany.

— Berlin Alexanderplatz

At this point, seeing him fairly suntanned beneath his pallor, she asked the mother if she had sent the child to the sea; and then Ida, blushing all over, confided to her in secret that she was preparing a surprise for him this year: for some time, in fact, she had been laying money aside, to take him to the sea or to the country, in the coming months of July and August.

— History

She has heard that he has abandoned his wife without money, with the two children.

— The Golden Notebook

Although she was well aware that he was deceiving her (being fully convinced that now she would have to bear everything, including even his faithlessness), she nevertheless put three thousand rubles at his disposal, letting him understand quite clearly that she was offering him this money to betray her with.

— The Brothers Karamazov

At the first sign of war, the Minister of Finance writes to his agents that no one has any money except the clergy.

— The Red and the Black

You have known for a long time what to do—you are intelligent enough to see it yourself: stop indulging in drunkenness and incontinence of speech, do not give way to sensual lust and particularly to your passion for money.

— The Brothers Karamazov

Well, he hain’t come back sence, and they ain’t looking for him back till this thing blows over a little, for people thinks now that he killed his boy and fixed things so folks would think robbers done it, and then he’d get Huck’s money without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit.

— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mr. Vincy was a little in awe of him, a little vain that he wanted to marry Rosamond, a little indisposed to raise a question of money in which his own position was not advantageous, a little afraid of being worsted in dialogue with a man better educated and more highly bred than himself, and a little afraid of doing what his daughter would not like.

— Middlemarch

He’s pocketed Franz’s money and gone off to Oranienburg and the farm.

— Berlin Alexanderplatz

Knowing all that, I offered him the money under the pretext that I wanted to send it to my sister in Moscow.

— The Brothers Karamazov

Each of the Morel children, William, then Annie, then Paul, had fetched the money on Friday afternoons, until they went themselves to work.

— Sons and Lovers

He robbed him of fifteen hundred rubles and then went straight to have his hair curled and, without even bothering to hide the money, practically carrying it around in his hand, just like this one, went off to a brothel.

— The Brothers Karamazov

Since Shuichi had gone to Kinu for the medical expenses, it did not seem that either he or Kikuko had money for presents.

— The Sound of the Mountain

Rastignac set his money on the table and took a seat, feeling an extraordinary heightened curiosity at the sudden change in this man who, having at first spoken about killing him, was now setting himself up as his protector.

— Père Goriot

And if he promised to double or treble her usual price and put the money on the table at the start, so that she did not need to think about it any more and could abandon herself to the carefree obliging state of mind that is brought about by having concluded a good piece of business, it would become apparent that pure indifference has the same merit as all pure feelings, which is that of being free of personal presumption and of functioning without the vain confusion caused by emotional demands.

— The Man Without Qualities

Now Mitzi is not slow, and she knows what Herbert said Franz is about, and she says: no, earning money for the sake of it, no, that’s not something he has to do, there are people who will help him out.

— Berlin Alexanderplatz

You should see my brother’s wife, they’re respectable people, a match for anyone, do you suppose they were too proud to collect stamp money, dole, whatever. 

— Berlin Alexanderplatz

So I’ll wait for you three or four or five or six hours or even seven hours, but I want you to know that today, even if it’s at midnight, you must go to Katerina’s, with or without the money, and tell her that I send her my best regards.

— The Brothers Karamazov

We’ll pay them in money—said the king.

— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

This time I had lost everything—my money, my men, the line, the trucks; we had constructed a small port and now we had nothing to export.

— Zorba the Greek

Also it was not to be thought but that an own brother “lying there” with dropsy in his legs must come to feel that blood was thicker than water, and if he didn’t alter his will, he might have money by him.

— Middlemarch

—What a mine of wealth, quoth I, as he counted me the money, has this post chaise brought me in?

— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

You’ll cook up something to get the money back.

— Père Goriot

As I said when Mr. Baldwin, the tax-gatherer, comes in, a-standing where you sit, and says, ‘Bulstrode got all his money as he brought into this town by thieving and swindling,’—I said, ‘You don’t make me no wiser, Mr. Baldwin: it’s set my blood a-creeping to look at him ever sin’ here he came into Slaughter Lane a-wanting to buy the house over my head: folks don’t look the color o’ the dough-tub and stare at you as if they wanted to see into your backbone for nothingk.’

— Middlemarch

Why, instead of that, does he ask us to believe in some money concealed in a crevice in a dungeon of the Castle of Udolpho?

— The Brothers Karamazov

Who has not seen people chew and swallow the cards or stuff themselves with a set of dice to avenge the loss of their money?

— Essays

Reinhold hitches up his trousers, prowls back and forth in his pad, too much peace and quiet don’t seem to agree with him, let alone having all that spending money.

— Berlin Alexanderplatz

The State spends money on every kind of foolishness, but hasn’t a copper to spare for solving the most important moral problems there are.

— The Man Without Qualities

The rent was correspondingly low, but all the rest—getting the place into a state of good repair and bringing it into line with modern ideas of comfort—had cost an unexpectedly large amount of money.

— The Man Without Qualities

They say the Henrouilles have more money than meets the eye …

— Journey to the End of the Night

He told them he was a pirate—been a pirate for thirty years, out in the Indian Ocean, and his crew was thinned out considerable, last spring, in a fight, and he was home now, to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he’d been robbed last night, and put ashore off of a steam-boat without a cent, and he was glad of it, it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all the pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there, without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, ‘Don’t you thank me, don’t you give me no credit, it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race—and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!’

— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

He only lacks money; and he by himself is enough for me.

— Children of Gebelawi

Then he would take his father the money he had collected.

— Children of Gebelawi
death

—And accordingly we find, that David wept for his son Absolom—Adrian for his Antinous—Niobe for her children, and that Apollodorus and Crito both shed tears for Socrates before his death.

— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson’s A.D.C., to write his friend’s death certificate.

— Midnight's Children

We’ll keep them till they’re ransomed to death—and a bothersome lot they’ll be, too, eating up everything and always trying to get loose.

— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

And in truth what we say we principally fear in death is pain, its customary forerunner.

— Essays

The death agony on the second floor didn’t last long.

— Journey to the End of the Night

And cries, shots, noise, triumph and tumult around Death.

— Berlin Alexanderplatz

All of them were expecting something immensely significant to happen immediately after the elder’s death.

— The Brothers Karamazov

“He abused the sacrament of confession,” came the accusing angry whispers of the most hardened opponents of the institution of elders, who counted among them some of the oldest monks, the strictest in their devotions, great fasters, famed for their long periods of silence, some of whom, indeed, had not spoken since long before Father Zosima’s death and who had now suddenly unsealed their lips.

— The Brothers Karamazov

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.

— Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Not that Julien was tenderhearted, as that word is understood in Paris; but neither was he a monster, and no one, since the death of the old surgeon major, had spoken to him so kindly.

— The Red and the Black

And as an evil growth beyond all cure

Creeps far and wide and wounds what once was well,

So by degrees the winter of dark death

Entered her heart and choked her breath and stopped

The lanes of life.

— Metamorphoses

The overwhelming power of names, and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily on Saheed’s mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the form of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid-air behind him, following him everywhere, biding its time.

— Midnight's Children

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.

— Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Oh, how death turns things upside down!

— Père Goriot

‘Five hundred meelion, what’s one death?’

— Midnight's Children

There was the compact; to resist tyranny to the death.

— To the Lighthouse

We know, we men, that we will die a painful death in a few moments.

— The Golden Notebook

I have no illusions, death awaits me; it will be just.

— The Red and the Black

A film rolled up over them, then with a small perceptible shake of determination it pushed death away and struggled for a moment in Paul’s hands.

— The Golden Notebook

He lay for several days between life and death.

— Anna Karenina

As soon as I heard of the death of Sawaaris, damn him, I hurried to you bringing my enemies’ sheep.

— Children of Gebelawi

But this meant no more than that for him the time had come when the prisoner wondered how he could have let himself be robbed of his freedom without fighting to the death for it.

— The Man Without Qualities

Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him; therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death.

— Middlemarch

Basic to sleep is the fact we wake up from it, as we presumably do not from death.

— The Book of Disquiet

He had just partly clarified the question of how to live, when he was presented with a new, insoluble problem — death.

— Anna Karenina

Why did you love your pride more than your own flesh and blood?

— Children of Gebelawi

My death had seemed to me the most personal of my decisions, my supreme redoubt as a free man; I was mistaken.

— Memoirs of Hadrian

In Thessaly, for their sons’ safe return,

The mothers and the aged fathers brought

Gifts to the gods and burnt the high-heaped incense

And the vowed victim with his gilded horns

Was slain; but one was absent from the throng,

Aeson, now near to death, weary and worn

By weight of years.

— Metamorphoses

You too, dear father, you, immortal now

And destined by your birthright to live on

Through all eternity, will long to die

When you are tortured by the serpent’s blood,

That agonizing poison in your wounds;

And, saved from immortality, the gods

Shall put you in death’s power, and the three

Goddesses shall unloose your threads of fate.

— Metamorphoses

Yet but to wish for death’s a cowardly thing.

— Metamorphoses

But not to let his death go unavenged,

Lycormas snatched in fury from the door

The right crossbar and crashed it down upon

Pettalus’ neck, and he dropped like an ox

Slaughtered in sacrifice.

— Metamorphoses

But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz’s death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.

— Midnight's Children

She kissed his face, and roused his blood, while his soul was apart writhing with the agony of death.

— Sons and Lovers