“Never make eye contact with a stranger when you’re having a churro.”
― quote from All My Life
“Breathless I look up at him and find him gazing at me with a wonder that my deep-seated insecurity finds hard to believe. Then he does this thing. His fingers start moving on my face, tracing outlines. They trail along my eyebrows, the ridge of my nose, the apple of my cheeks and the line of my jaw. His touch is like feather but his eyes…they blaze and just like that, without saying a single word, he makes me believe.”
― quote from All My Life
“You know when you mix butt and Angel in the same sentence, it becomes an insult,” I say and take a big gulp from the can. With his back to me, he says, “Trust me, I would never dream of insulting your butt. I’m sure it’s better than anything I’m cooking out here.”
― quote from All My Life
“After a few seconds of scraping, I realize what he has isn’t a trail, it’s a whole forest! Ack! Weren’t all men supposed to shave their chest and stuff nowadays? Whatever happened to having fuzz-free Hollywood heroes as role models? At least my embarrassment is completely foregone by the irritation at his lack of upkeep. The only thing distracting me now is that heady mix of musk, shaving cream and a distinctly…male scent. And God knows that is one seriously jeopardizing distraction. Especially with a whizzing needle in one’s hand.”
― quote from All My Life
“Neil Mars?! I could blame him for having killer looks but he could not be faulted for this. He couldn’t have chosen that name for himself. No wonder he tortures his Mom by calling her by her name.”
― quote from All My Life
“Maybe that’s why I like reading fantasy novels so much. The world in there is so much more interesting than mine.”
― quote from All My Life
“Neil’s not a bad guy, Mom. He just looks like one. It’s like he has the mystery but…not the deceit.” “Looks like Nine Inch Nails but sings like Michael Bolton?” “Who’s Michael Bolton?”
― quote from All My Life
“it. “She’s got AIDS!” Mom’s mouth pops open and she flops back on the couch as if the air just got kicked out of her lungs. “AIDS?” she whispers. I nod my head and she gives me a sharp look. “How?” “From a local clinic in Africa. She fell sick on vacation.”
― quote from All My Life
“Oh God! Please. Just please. Blind me, kill me, just…just end it. I’m so tired. Too tired to do it on my own.”
― quote from All My Life
“As a little girl your mind is filled with snow white, dwarfs, wizards, then you grow up and you realize you’ve got it all wrong. Life’s the dead opposite of a fairy tale. It’s”
― quote from All My Life
“But aren’t you going to miss it? The fame? The money?” He smiles. “Those are just things one misses when one hasn’t had a taste of them. Trust”
― quote from All My Life
“that’s why people often compare love to drugs. It’s”
― quote from All My Life
“The more you taste it, the more you crave it...wait a second...taste?!”
― quote from All My Life
“Is he the one? The Neo to my Trinity?”
― quote from All My Life
“So last night I was watching TV and they had this movie on. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. This girl loves this guy on e-mail and hates the same guy in person? But she doesn’t know they’re both the same and when she realizes, she thinks she hates his guts. Only he gives this epic romantic monologue in the end and so she decides she can’t help but fall in love with him,” Nalini”
― quote from All My Life
“Your Dad called and he said you’re not replying to any of his e-mails or returning his calls. Why is that?”
― quote from All My Life
“Your Dad called and he said you’re not replying to any of his e-mails or returning his calls. Why is that?” I shrug my shoulders in response.”
― quote from All My Life
“You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."
"What about Rwanda?"
"Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere.”
― Gil Courtemanche, quote from A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
“Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad”
― David Lodge, quote from Small World
“We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self
because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a
great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away,
of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate
something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?”
― Ernest Becker, quote from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
“After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin's newspaper.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Breathless
“I would think you an utter fool if you did not doubt me, warrior. Instead, I am forced to respect your uncommon intelligence. Now what, do you suppose, should I do from there?”
― Jacquelyn Frank, quote from Elijah
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The Book of Ivy
Daja's BookBookQuoters 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.
