“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“You just stood up to your mother.... I should think now you could take on the world.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do. Even Jesus wrestled with that. But I think - I think the ability to receive love is as important as the ability to give it. It's one and the same really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“You've been through a great deal," his mother conceded. "But the back strengthens to the burdens it has to bear, and I'd like to see a little more backbone in you.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“bodies becoming like prisons with the person stuck inside. Screaming, or not screaming, but staring at you like you should do something.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“People are afraid of what they do not understand.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Conspiracy
“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.”
― Carson McCullers, quote from The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
“It's like when you take a trip with someone you don't know very well. Sometimes, you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realize all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travelers.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, quote from Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
“No self-respecting bird in good health would allow its feathers to look ruffled. No confident cougar would let its fur long remain matted and dirty.”
― Terry Goodkind, quote from Chainfire
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.