“One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“Our lives can hold just so much. If they're filled with one thing, they can't be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“We'll just have to find more flowers in the spring. That's when they bloom, tra la.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“All those resolutions she had made on Babcock's bay! How they had been smashed to smithereens! She wondered whether life consisted of making resolutions and breaking them, of climbing up and slipping down.
'I believe that's it', she thought. 'And the bright side of it is that you never slip down to quite the point you started climbing from. You always gain a little....'
She thought about those lists she had made in her programs for self-improvement. She hadn't followed them out by any means, but they had revealed her ideals....
'We're growing up,' Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try to see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be.
'I'd like to be a fine one,' Betsy thought quickly and urgently.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“We're growing up and I don't like it," said Tacy, as they say at Heinz's later, drinking coffee.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“Our lives can only hold so much. If they’re filled with one thing, they can’t be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change," Betsy decided profoundly.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, quote from Betsy Was a Junior
“The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Memoirs of Cleopatra
“Daisy smiled and said, “Jay Berry, you won’t die. You may think you will, but you won’t. In a day or two, you’ll be as good as new, I hope.” “You’re just saying that because you heard Papa say it,” I said. “No, I’m not!” Daisy said. “I’m saying it because I’m a nurse, and nurses are supposed to cheer up their patients.” I knew all too well that once Daisy had gotten into one of her Red Cross nursing spells, it was ridiculous to even think of trying to argue her out of it. So I just groaned, closed my eyes, and sat there while”
― Wilson Rawls, quote from Summer of the Monkeys
“When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from A Soldier of the Great War
“The truth sometimes reminds me of a city buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and occasionally it's blown away and what's below is revealed.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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.