“I know you've taken risks to do these things. Do Please be careful."
"Don't worry about me," he said. "You've got enough troubles on your own plate, my word. But we'll come out all right, so long as we just keep alive, that's all we got to do. Just keep alive another two years, till the war's over.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done."
"That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“Men' s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong tgem, God is well acquainted with what ye do.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“He said, "The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well." She”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“Leave-takings are stupid things, and best forgotten about as quickly as possible.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from A Town Like Alice
“You can love someone, hell, you can love a lot of someones, but when you find the right person—the one that you’re meant to be with—it’s like…” “You can breathe for the first time,” she finishes for me.”
― Cheryl McIntyre, quote from Before Now
“ Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into madness.”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History
“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself”
― Tom Holland, quote from Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
“What we need more than anything, Amy, is each other. I need you, baby. I need you alive and well, in my bed and in my life. The idea of losing you is torture, but I know you aren’t my property. You’re the woman who changed me in ways I don’t even fully understand.”
― Lisa Renee Jones, quote from Infinite Possibilities
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.