In Band Candy, the Scoobies ran into Principal Snyder who was giving students chocolate to sell. Xander said, “You weren’t visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, by any chance?” He’s referring to the Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol, in which a man named Scrooge changes his miserly ways …

In the Angel episode, Eternity, we see Cordelia acting her way (badly) through Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. The play is a critical look at Victorian marriages, concentrating on the decline of the marriage of Nora to Torvald. Cordelia plays Nora.

In Tough Love, Willow mentions Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Girls, which was a strict Victorian school in the book A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

In Primeval, Spike says, “Alice heads back down the rabbit hole.” He’s referring to Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, about a girl named Alice who sees a rabbit in a waist-coat and follows him down a rabbit hole into a world named Wonderland.
The Angel episode Through The …

In ‘In the Dark‘, Cordelia says to Doyle: “I think the trick is laying of the ale before you start quoting Angela’s Ashes and weeping like a baby man.” Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s autobiography about his childhood in Limerick, Ireland.

The title of the episode Beauty and the Beasts comes from the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.

In The Wish, Cordelia unwittingly made a wish to vengeance demon Anyanka. She wished that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale. Later, Anyanka, admiring her work, said, “Brave New World. I hope she likes it.” She’s referring to Aldous Huxley’s science fiction novel Brave New World.
The origin of the phrase …

In Beauty and the Beasts, Buffy reads quotes from Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild. The story is told from the point of view of Buck, a dog who is stolen from his home and forced to become a sled dog in the Alaskan wilderness. He is …

The Angel episode Carpe Noctem is named after a goth magazine that ran in the 1990s. It was best known for Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comic. The name Carpe Noctem is a pun on the Latin expression ‘carpe diem’ (”seize the day”) meaning “seize the night.”

In the episode The Prom, Tucker Wells tried to ruin the School Prom by training hellhounds to attack people wearing tuxedoes. Buffy says she’s “Gotta stop a crazy from pulling a Carrie at the prom”. She’s referring to the book Carrie by Stephen King, in which a telekinetic girl destroys …

In Home, Lilah says to Angel, “Come on, Charlie. Let me show you around the Chocolate Factory.” This is a reference to Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, in which a poor boy named Charlie wins a tour through the mysterious Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, which ultimately leads …

In Into the Woods, Xander mentions Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov (1860-1904): “The chimp playing hockey? Is that based on the Chekov?” Chekhov’s plays include The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters and The Seagull.

In the episode Ted, the Scoobies have a discussion about Buffy killing a person that follows as such:

Cordelia: “I don’t get it, Buffy’s the slayer shouldn’t she have - ”
Xander: “What, a license to kill?”
Cordelia: “Well, not for fun. But she’s like this superman, shouldn’t there be different rules …

In Some Assembly Required, Giles tries to think of a way to ask Jenny Calendar on a date. Overhearing him, Buffy suggests he say, “Hey, I got a thing, you maybe have a thing, maybe we could have a thing” to which Giles replies, “Oh, thank you, Cyrano.” This is …

In Bargaining (Part 1), the Buffybot says a bizarre selection of words, to which Spike says, “What’s with the Dadaism, Red?” In The Freshman, Buffy says to Xander, “Thanks for the Dadaist pep talk, I feel much more abstract now.” Dadaism was the nihilistic artistic movement in the early twentieth …