Return a random quote from the corpus, optionally filtered by author, fame, verification status, or tag. Each result includes citation: work, year, speaker (for plays/fiction), and source URL.
Search quotes by substring. Matches both canonical text and known popular paraphrases — searching for 'protest' finds Hamlet's 'The lady doth protest too much, methinks' even though the popular form 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much' is what most people remember.
Given a quote and (optionally) the author it is claimed to be by, return one of four verdicts: "verified" (genuine, with citation), "misattributed" (no primary source — popular but fake), "paraphrase_of_verified" (popular corruption of a real quote, returns the actual text), or "no_match" (not in c…
Look up quotes by structural address within a work — act/scene for plays, chapter for novels. Example: author_id="william-shakespeare", work_title="Hamlet", act=3, scene=1 returns the "To be, or not to be" line.
Return all authors available in the corpus — each entry includes author id (used as input to other tools), display name, birth/death dates, and public-domain status.
List works for which the full text (every scene, speech, and line) is loaded — beyond just the famous-quote excerpts. Use this to discover what is available for deep structural lookup via get_scene and get_act.
Return the full text of a specific scene from a play (every speech, every line, in order). Example: author_id="william-shakespeare", work_slug="hamlet", act=3, scene=1 returns the entire "To be, or not to be" scene including all of Hamlet's soliloquy and the subsequent dialogue with Ophelia. Useful…
Return the full text of an entire act (all scenes within it). Use this to read a full structural unit at once. Returned object contains nested scenes with their speeches and lines.
Return the full text of a chapter from a novel/prose work (all paragraphs in order). Example: author_id="oscar-wilde", work_slug="the-picture-of-dorian-gray", chapter=2 returns the entire chapter where Lord Henry tempts Dorian. Use list_full_text_works to discover which works are chapter-based.