“What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you 'Don't worry. This may be your life but you're not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you -- it's already organised.' It's all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o'clock, and the dual personality of the city's main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire and live by love though the stars walk backwards.”
― Ben Sherwood, quote from Charlie St. Cloud
“I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Star Girl
“What is your reaction when your loved one walks through the door? Has the sun come out, or do you hear distant rumbles of thunder? Does cold ice settle around your heart, knowing that the road ahead is going to be fraught with slippery patches, or can you lean back and enjoy the sunshine? Think of your heart and your soul as the weather, and listen to what they’re telling you. You are entitled to feel the heat of the sun’s rays, but getting to that warm place may mean you have to survive some rainy days first.”
― Rachel Abbott, quote from The Back Road
“From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that’s bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees. That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past. For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name! The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.”
― Ashlee Vance, quote from Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
“bent down in front of the vent and turned my head, coughing from the dark smoke. A small, red orange fire began to take form. In a flash I grabbed the can of lighter fluid”
― Dave Pelzer, quote from The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search For The Love Of A Family
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.