“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
“was good enough when good men held the office, but always when you create an office that a man can lay hands on, an evil man will someday lay hands on it.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Alvin Journeyman
“God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
“I invite you to consider anew what you know and what you have; what you are here for and where you are going; and how you are going to do what you have come here to do. p 13”
― Sheri Dew, quote from No Doubt About It
“When death is no longer seen as release from this miserable materiality into our rightful immateriality, when death is seen rather as the slicing off of what God declared to be, and what all of us feel to be, of great worth, then death is—well, not friend but enemy. Though I shall indeed recall that death is being overcome, my grief is that death still stalks this world and one day knifed down my Eric. Nothing fills the void of his absence. He’s not replaceable. We can’t go out and get another just like him.”
― Nicholas Wolterstorff, quote from Lament for a Son
“I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
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.