“Se viveres, um dia serás livre; a pedra do sepulcro é que nunca se levanta.”
― Camilo Castelo Branco, quote from Amor de Perdição
“A verdade é algumas vezes o escolho de um romance.
Na vida real recebemo-la como ela sai dos encontrados casos ou da lógica
implacável das coisas; mas, na novela, custa-nos a sofrer que o autor, se inventa, não invente melhor; e, se copia, não minta por amor da arte.
Um romance que estriba na verdade o seu merecimento é frio, é impertinente, é uma coisa que não sacode os nervos, nem tira a gente, sequer uma
temporada, enquanto ele nos lembra, deste jogo de nora, cujos alcatruzes somos, uns a subir, outros a descer, movidos pela manivela do egoísmo.
A verdade! Se ela é feia, para que oferecê-la em painéis ao público!?
A verdade do coração humano! Se o coração humano tem filamentos de
ferro que o prendem ao barro donde saiu, ou pesam nele e o submergem no charco da culpa primitiva, para que é emergi-lo, retratá-lo e pô-lo à venda!?
Os reparos são de quem tem o juízo no seu lugar; mas, pois que eu perdi o
meu a estudar a verdade, já agora a desforra que tenho é pintá-la como ela é, feia e repugnante.
A desgraça afervora ou quebranta o amor?
Isto é que eu submeto à decisão do leitor inteligente. Fatos e não teses é o
que eu trago para aqui. O pintor retrata uns olhos, e não explica as funções ópticas do aparelho visual.”
― Camilo Castelo Branco, quote from Amor de Perdição
“O pão do trabalho de cada dia e o teu seio para pousar uma hora a face, pura de manchas: não pedi mais nada ao Céu. Achei-me homem aos dezasseis anos. Vi a virtude à luz do teu amor. Cuidei que era santa a paixão que absorvia todas as outras, ou as depurava com o seu fogo sagrado. Nunca os meus pensamentos foram denegridos por um desejo, que eu não possa confessar alto diante de todo o mundo. Diz tu, Teresa, se meus lábios profanaram a pureza de teus ouvidos. Pergunta a Deus quando quis eu fazer do meu amor o teu opróbrio.”
― Camilo Castelo Branco, quote from Amor de Perdição
“Não deve custar a morte a quem tiver o coração tranquilo. O pior é a saudade, saudade daquelas esperanças que tu achavas no meu coração.”
― Camilo Castelo Branco, quote from Amor de Perdição
“O coração é a víscera, ferida de paralisia, a primeira que falece sufocada pelas rebeliões da alma que se identifica à natureza, e a quer, e se devora na ânsia dela, e se estorce nas agonias da amputação, para as quais a saudade da ventura extinta é um cautério em brasa; e o amor, que leva ao abismo pelo caminho da sonhada felicidade, não é sequer um refrigério.”
― Camilo Castelo Branco, quote from Amor de Perdição
“Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.
The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved
“The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“Annie, the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.”
― Charles Martin, quote from When Crickets Cry
“How does it feel to know that even at my worst, you're still not good enough?”
― Courtney Summers, quote from Cracked Up to Be
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