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The Prisoner of Zenda

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Frontispiece to the 1898 Macmillan Publishers edition, illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson.

The Prisoner of Zenda is an 1894 adventure novel by Anthony Hope that tells the story of an Englishman forced to impersonate the king of the fictional country Ruritania. The most remembered of Hope's numerous works, it inspired the genre of Ruritanian romance.

Quotes

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  • Good families are generally worse than any others.
    • Chapter I: "The Rassendylls—With a Word on the Elphbergs"
  • Ah! but a man cannot be held to write down in cold blood the wild and black thoughts that storm his brain when an uncontrolled passion has battered a breach for them. Yet, unless he sets up as a saint, he need not hate himself for them. He is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in giving thanks that power to resist was vouchsafed to him than in fretting over wicked impulses which come unsought and extort an unwilling hospitality from the weakness of our nature.
    • Chapter XI: "Hunting a Very Big Boar"
  • It makes your sin no worse, as I conceive, to do it à la mode and stylishly.
    • Chapter XII: "I Receive a Visitor and Bait a Hook"
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