“It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Beyond the Chocolate War
“Sometimes I wake up at night in a panic. Wondering: What will my life be like? And sometimes I even wonder: Who am I? What am I doing here, on this planet, in this city, in this house? And it gives me the shivers, makes me panic.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Beyond the Chocolate War
“What have I done, Obie?"
Obie flung his hand in the air, the gesture encompassing all the rotten things that had occur under Archie's command, at Archie's direction. The ruined kids, the capsized hopes. Renault last fall and poor Tubs Casper and all the others including even the faculty. Like Brother Eugene.
"You know what you've done, Archie. I don't need to draw up a list-"
"You blame me for everything, right, Obie? You and Carter and all the others. Archie Costello, the bad guy. The villain. Archie, the bastard. Trinity would be such a beautiful place without Archie Costello. Right, Obie? But it's not me, Obie, it's not me...."
"Not you?" Obie cried, fury gathering in his throat, his chest, his guts. "What the hell do you mean, not you? This could have been a beautiful place to be, Archie. A beautiful time for all of us. Christ, who else, if not you?"
"Do you really want to know who?"
"Okay, who then?" Impatient with his crap, the old Archie crap.
"It's you, Obie. You and Carter and Bunting and Leon and everybody. But especially you, Obie. Nobody forced you to do anything, buddy. Nobody made you join the Vigils. Nobody twisted your arm to make you secretary of the Vigils. Nobody pain you to keep a notebook with all that crap about the students, all their weaknesses, soft points. The notebook made your job easier, didn't it, Obie? And what was your job? Finding the victims. You found them, Obie. You found Renault and Tubs Casper and Gendreau-the first one, remember, when we were sophomores?-how you loved it all, didn't you Obie?" Archie flicked a finger against the metal of the car, and the ping was like a verbal exclamation mark. "Know what, Obie? You could have said no anytime, anytime at all. But you didn't...." Archie's voice was filled with contempt, and he pronounced Obie's name as if it were something to be flushed down a toilet.
"Oh, I'm an easy scapegoat, Obie. For you and everybody else at Trinity. Always have been. But you had free choice, buddy. Just like Brother Andrew always says in Religion. Free choice, Obie, and you did the choosing....”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Beyond the Chocolate War
“Angry at his parents and all grown-ups who thought that school life was a lark, a good time, the best years of your life with a few test and quizzes thrown in to keep you on your toes. Bullshit. There was nothing good about it. Tests were daily battles in the larger war of school. School meant rules and orders and commands. To say nothing of homework.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Beyond the Chocolate War
“Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Beyond the Chocolate War
Robert Cormier
Born place: in Leominster, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date January 17, 1925
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“Art is as useful as bread.”
― Azar Nafisi, quote from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“Being in love is a very strange thing. Your thoughts constantly drift towards this other person, no matter what you're doing.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Power of Six
“There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives
“...and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better. But come! I'll tell you a story of another kind.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from Nicholas Nickleby
“If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.”
― Sophocles, quote from The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone
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Economics in One Les...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.
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