“You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed.”
“How do you find happiness?” Anna paused, then said, “You start by looking right around you for the blessings you have.”
“The best thing is to grieve for the people you loved and lost, and then welcome and love the new people life puts in front of you.”
“It all made Pino realize that the earth did not know war, that nature would go on no matter what horror one man might inflict on another. Nature didn’t care a bit about men and their need to kill and conquer.”
“Isn’t it strange how life is always taking you to places and to people you’re supposed to see and meet?” “You”
“Sometimes happiness comes to us. But usually you have to seek it out.”
“by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole.” He”
“Do what I sometimes do when I get scared: imagine you’re someone else, someone who’s far braver and smarter.”
“Nothing in life worth doing is easy,”
“Pino was seized by something much more compelling and primal, as if Anna were not human but a spirit, a melody, a perfect instrument of love.”
“how can you survive what life throws at you if you cannot laugh and love, and are they not the same thing?”
“Doing favors,” Leyers said. “They help wondrously over the course of a lifetime. When you have done men favors, when you look out for others so they can prosper, they owe you. With each favor, you become stronger, more supported. It is a law of nature.” “Yes?” Pino said. “Yes,” Leyers said. “You can never go wrong in this way, because there will be times when you will need a favor, and it will be right there waiting to come to the rescue. This practice has saved me more than once.”
“Maybe that’s all it takes for the future to exist, Pino thought. You must imagine it first. You must dream it first.”
“How do men think of such wickedness?” Anna asked as wax dripped down the candle and pooled about the holder. “Don’t they fear for their souls?” Pino thought about Rauff and the Black Shirts wearing the hoods. “I don’t think men like that care about their souls,” Pino said, finishing the veal. “It’s like they’ve already gone to evil, and going a little deeper won’t matter.”
“It would be surprising if you didn’t hate me for what I’ve had to do today. A part of me hates myself. But I have orders. Winter is coming. My country is under siege. Without this food, my people will starve. So here in Italy, and in your eyes, I’m a criminal. Back home, I’ll be an unsung hero. Good. Evil. It’s all a question of perspective, is it not?”
“The best thing is to grieve for the people you loved and lost, and then welcome and love the”
“Alberto Ascari says there have been atrocities, Father,” Pino said. “The Nazis have killed priests helping Jews. They’ve pulled them right off the altar while they were saying Mass.” “We have heard that, too,” the priest said. “But we can’t stop loving our fellow man, Pino, because we’re frightened. If we lose love, all is lost. We just have to get smarter.”
“But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed. And we must have faith in God, and in the Universe, and in a better tomorrow, even if that faith is not always deserved.” “Pino”
“All great things come from love, don’t they?” “I guess they do,” Anna said, and looked away. “The worst things, too.”
“If a bomb’s coming at you, it’s coming at you. You can’t go around worrying about it. Just go on doing what you love, and go on enjoying your life.”
“To the end of homicidal dictators with weird black bangs and puny square mustaches!” The”
“If you stay too close to someone like Hitler, you are going to burn someday.”
“Seeing them butcher the dead . . . I don’t know, Father . . . It makes me question my faith in mankind, in people being good deep down, not savages, not like that.”
“Pino at that moment seemed to me like a portal into a long-ago world where the ghosts of war and courage, the demons of hatred and inhumanity, and the arias of faith and love still played out within the good and decent soul who'd survived to tell the tales.”
“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
“The Alps had taught him not to fret and whine at difficult circumstances. It was a waste of energy.”
“said, “You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed. And we must have faith in God, and in the Universe, and in a better tomorrow, even if that faith is not always deserved.” “Pino Lella’s prescription for a long, happy life?”
“They shared a long silence. “What do we do, Father?” “We have faith, Pino. We have faith and continue to do what is right.”
“You never want to be the absolute leader in the game of life, the man out front, the one everyone sees and looks to,”
“I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him.
Then I turn to look for what it is we're supposed to be seeing.”
“How is San Francisco, Alex? Lovely city. Will you leave your heart there? Do you think it's a good place to die?”
“La desgracia de Adam Appleby era que, en cuanto despertaba del sueño, su conciencia se inundaba inmediatamente de todo aquello en lo que menos deseaba pensar. Tenía la impresión de que otros hombres se enfrentaban a cada nuevo amanecer con la mente y el corazón renovados, llenos de optimismo y decisión; o bien de que se arrastraban ganduleando durante la primera hora del día en un estado de bendito sopor, incapaces de pensar en nada, ni agradable ni desagradable. Pero, agazapados como arpías en torno a su cama, los pensamientos desagradables esperaban para asaltarle tan pronto como Adam parpadease y abriera los ojos. En aquel momento se veía obligado, como alguien que se ahoga, a examinar su vida entera, dividido entre lamentaciones por el pasado y miedos futuros.”
“Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.”
“Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart," he read aloud from an old essay on marriage that he found in his files.
"Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness...and looks forward to happiness and content feels the necessity of loving. Without it, life is unfinished...”
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.