Bookworm or not, you can’t help but enjoy these black and white illustrations of literary quotes by Evan Robertson. The New York-based graphic designer has taken some of the cleverest lines written by famous authors such as William Faulkner and Oscar Wilde and turned them into wonderful posters. These literature-inspired fine art illustrations are currently being sold on Etsy under the name Obvious State.
Robertson would see a “little jewel of a sentence” and he’d underline it. Then, he would take those “snippets of text and ideas” and “let the words be a springboard for an illustration.” As he told Huffington Post, “The illustrations incorporate and interact with the text and hopefully add up to something that engages the mind as much as the eye.”
Here are 12 of our favorites. May these timeless words inspire you today and always.
Update: Check out more clever illustrations in Part II of this story.