Quotes from Authority

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“So long as you don't tell people you don't know something, they'll probably think you know it.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn't want the fearful unknown of a 'pristine wilderness.' They didn't want a soulless artificial life, either.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill...”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: “Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“It’s not superstition,” she said. They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools. “It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people's minds in the modern era.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“The fish rots from the head.” Fish rotted all over, cell corruption being nonhierarchical and not caste-driven, but point taken.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.” The”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he'd thought a change of setting - leaving the confines of the concrete coffin - might help soften her animosity. Before he realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“He went into another bar already drunk, found himself confronted by a ghost. Earlier that night he had glimpsed hints of them--in the curl of a lip that sparked a memory, a flicker of an eyelid, the way someone's hand lingered on a tabletop. Those shoes. That dress. But when you encountered a real ghost--the Thing Entire--it was a shock. . .it took your breath. Not away. It didn't take your breath away--your breath wasn't going anywhere. Your breath was still in you, locked up, not of use to you. Took your pulse only to mutter dire predictionsfor the future because the Ghost Entire trapped Control somewhere between the person he had been and the person he had become. And yet it was still just a wraith. Just a woman he had known in high school.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“If he'd had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

“Many things receded into the distance behind him, seemed ridiculous or fantastical, or both. Were, at their core, unimportant.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

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Popular quotes

“Do the day and let the day do you.”
― Stephen King, quote from Duma Key

“The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Crossing

“We could mate. In a year our nestlings would be large enough to mob anyone we like...Should I begin to court you? Do you like grubs or ants better?...I will be here. In case you change your mind about mating.”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from Trickster's Choice

“sometimes I just get so frustrated with games of human attraction.” “How so?” “It’s all masked in posturing and ploys. There’s no honesty. People can’t just come up and express their attraction. It’s got to be cleverly obscured with some stupid pick-up line or not-so-subtle gift, and I don’t really know how to play those games so well. We’re taught that it’s wrong to be honest, like there’s some kind of social stigma with it.”
― Richelle Mead, quote from Storm Born

“It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you
care to try it?"
"No, indeed," I answered brusquely. "My constitution has not got
over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra
strain upon it."
He smiled at my vehemence. "Perhaps you are right, Watson," he
said. "I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find
it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the
mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Sign of Four

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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.