The ten best quotable novels

Alex Clark formerly wrote for the Observer Magazine.

One entry on her list of the ten best quotable novels, as shared at the Guardian:

Animal Farm
George Orwell, 1945

“Four legs good, two legs bad”, a key tenet of Animalism, the credo by which the animal characters – or “Beasts of England” – wage their war against human governance, has lodged firmly in the language, as has the evidence of their corruption, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. Orwell’s purpose was to allegorise revolutionary and Stalinist Russia; his brilliant ear for the bombast of totalitarianism carried through to Nineteen Eighty-Four, published six months before his death in 1950, with its “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “thoughtcrime” and, of course, “Big Brother”.

Read about the other titles on the list.

Animal Farm is one of Piers Torday's top ten books with animal villains, Robson Green's six best books, Heather Brooke's five books on holding power to account, Chuck Klosterman's most important books; it appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best pigs in literature and Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of well-known and beloved science fiction and fantasy novels that were rejected over and over.

--Marshal Zeringue