“They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“My body is not my own any more. They have stamped their names all over it.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“I am not falling apart. I am being ripped at the seams, my insides torn out until I am hollow.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“Is it possible to want everything to change and nothing to change, all at the same time?”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“I like it better when my room is pitch black, when the dark is so thick it swallows me up and I feel as if I could drown in it.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“What's wrong with what I'm wearing?"
"I don't know, Em." Bryan takes a gulp from his water bottle. "It's a bit slutty, isn't it?"
I stare pointedly at the FHM poster Blu-Tacked on the wall opposite the bed, of some topless model, one finger in her mouth, the other hand reaching into her knickers.
"That's different.”
― Louise O'Neill, quote from Asking For It
“Allan interrupted the two brothers by saying that he had been out and about in the world and if there was one thing he had learned it was that the very biggest and apparently most impossible conflicts on earth were based on the dialogue: “You are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid.” The solution, said Allan, was often to down a bottle of vodka together and then look ahead.”
― Jonas Jonasson, quote from The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
“You went up a girl and came down a woman.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Monsters of Men
“It wasn't disgust she felt for Karou, not anymore; it was indignation. Incredulity. A man like Akiva crosses worlds to find you, infiltrates the enemy capital just to dance with you, bends heaven and hell to avenge your death, saves your comrade and kin from torture and death, and you send him off looking gut-punched, diminished, carved hollow?”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“The only way to truly be safer, was to accept the dark, to walk in it with eyes wide open, to be a part of it. To keep your enemies close.”
― C.J. Roberts, quote from Captive in the Dark
“The door banged open, and Eve rushed out, flushed and mussed and still buttoning her shirt. 'It's not what you think,' she said. 'It was just—oh, okay, whatever, it was exactly what you think. Now, what?”
― Rachel Caine, quote from Lord of Misrule
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.