“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“The news should have terrified her, but it was difficult to be frightened of anything when she was sitting so close to Rom. 'I thought we had convinced him that I was leading a blameless life?' 'We had, till you burst out of that damnable cake.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.
"It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“-they were still practicing the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“There’s like a dude at the door, asking for you?”
“Did you let him in?”
“No. I said I would check with you.”
“Well, did you ask his name?”
“Yeah. It’s Mr. Rickard.”
“That’s Adam you idiot! Go and let him in!”
“But he’s like fit!”
“No need to sound so shocked.”
“You’re dating him?”
“Yes. look, I haven’t got time to go this, and he is standing out on the doorstep.”
“Fucking hell Mum, like, way to go.”
― Robert Bryndza, quote from The Not So Secret Emails Of Coco Pinchard
“That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.”
― Suki Kim, quote from Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
“We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.”
― Chris Kraus, quote from I Love Dick
“But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from A Spool of Blue Thread
“Nurse Winter stares at me, her face looking blank for a moment. "Are you sure?" she asks. "Positive,”
― Amy Cross, quote from Asylum
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.
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