“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“True learning only occurs when you love the subject you are studying and then the acquiring of knowledge is effortless because it is also a pleasure.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“I felt shocked and then saddened. life does this to you sometimes - leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit, to mix a metaphor.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“The pleasures of my life here are simple – simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Café de France – Marie Thérèse inside making me a sandwich au camembert. Munching the knob of a fresh baguette as I wander back from Sainte-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. A huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon – the soft dialing-tone of the crickets at dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom – and, as I go to sleep, the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Those were the years when I was truly happy. Knowing that is both a blessing and a curse. It's good to acknowledge that you found true happiness in your life - in that sense your life has not been wasted. But to admit that you will never be happy like that again is hard.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“But you can be too intelligent, I said. Sometimes it's not an asset it's a curse.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“We're not ready for it - for people our age to die. We think we're safe for a while, but it's a dream. No one's safe.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“You think it begins to diminish with time, the pain, then it comes back and hits you with a rawness and freshness you had forgotten.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“I experienced a form of grief so intense and pure I thought it would kill me.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Why does the sea induce these feelings of transcendence in us? Is it because an unobstructed view of overarching sky meeting endlessly stirring water is as close as we can come on this earth to a visual symbol of the infinite?”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“I love to use these phrases - 'with the greatest respect', 'in all modest', 'I humbly submit' - which in fact always imply the complete opposite.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Are there aspects of our lives - things we do, feel and think - that we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“When it's mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world - as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“Is it possible to live reasonably without lying? Do lies form the natural foundation of all human relationships, the thread that stitches our individual selves together?”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“A Horrible thought: could this be the pattern of my life ahead? Every ambition thwarted, every dream stillborn? But a seconds reflection tells me that what I'm currently experiencing is shared by all sentient, suffering human beings, except for the very, very few: the genuinely talented - the odd, rare genius - and, of course, the exceptionally lucky swine.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“When I think of my youth, he went in, what we took for granted, what we assumed was for ever certain, for ever permanent.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“It's amazing how sudden the effect is - it must be the result of a deep atavistic mating urge buried inside us. A glance and you think: 'Yes, this is the one, this one is right for me.' Every instinct in your body seems to sing in unison.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
“They are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and it's essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer us - a stoical in the hedonism.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
William Boyd
Born place: in Accra, Ghana
Born date March 7, 1952
See more on GoodReads
“I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”
― Thomas Harris, quote from Hannibal
“Who are you anyway? What are you even doing here?”
“Haven,” she said quietly, peeking at him.
He gazed at her peculiarly. “Heaven? No, this definitely isn't Heaven. But I get why you’re confused, since I'm standing in front of you.” She stared at him, and he
cracked a smile. “I'm kidding. Well, kinda… I have been told I've taken a girl to Heaven a time or two.”
“Haven, not Heaven,” she said, louder than before. Nothing about the conversation made sense to her. “My name’s Haven.”
― J.M. Darhower, quote from Sempre
“Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!”
― Sarah Waters, quote from Tipping the Velvet
“Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from The Wide Window
“Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
No Logo
Gideon
One Good Knight
The Algebraist
Master of the Senate
The Conquest of GaulBookQuoters 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.
