Quotes from A Child's Garden of Verses

“The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“To My Mother
You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“Time which none can bind,
While flowing fast away, leaves love behind.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“In winter I get up at night,
and dress by yellow candlelight,
In summer, quite the other day,
I have to go to bed by day”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“All by myself I have to go,   With none to tell me what to do—   All alone beside the streams   And up the mountain-sides of dreams.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“Try as I like to find the way,   I never can get back by day,   Nor can remember plain and clear   The curious music that I hear.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“The world is so full of a number of things,        I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“  Years may go by, and the wheel in the river        Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day,   Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever        Long after all of the boys are away.   Home for the Indies and home from the ocean,        Heroes and soldiers we all will come home;   Still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion,        Turning and churning that river to foam.   You with the bean that I gave when we quarrelled,        I with your marble of Saturday last,   Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled,        Here we shall meet and remember the past.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

“Time to Rise
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon my window sill,
Cocked his shining eye and said:
"Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from A Child's Garden of Verses

About the author

Popular quotes

“The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.”
― Ann Patchett, quote from Bel Canto

“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from A Short History of Nearly Everything

“A lawyer had to be himself in the courtroom, and if he was afraid, so be it. The jurors were afraid too. Make friends with fear, Lucien always said, because it will not go away, and it will destroy you if left uncontrolled.”
― John Grisham, quote from A Time to Kill

“[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Cold Mountain

“I do not like the studied air and artificial inflexions of voice which your very popular and most admired preachers generally have. A simple delivery is much better calculated to inspire devotion, and shows a much better taste.”
― Jane Austen, quote from The Complete Novels

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.