“When a man's stories are remembered, then he is immortal.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“Dreams are what keep a man going.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“The ending is always a surprise.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They're not last words but passwords, and as soon as they're spoken you can go.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it…You’re just supposed to believe in it.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William. We're a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don't understand, do you?"
I didn't. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father's dream I remembered where we'd met before.
"And what did my father do for you?" I asked him, and the old man smiled.
"He made me laugh," he said.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“People were so cheap there... they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’s lived his whole life like a turtle, within an emotional carapace that makes for the perfect defense: there’s absolutely no way in. My hope is that in these last moments he’ll show me the vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn’t happening, yet, and I’m a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke. There is a never a yes or no, what do you think, here, according to me, is the meaning of life. “Why”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“Still,” he says, “if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that’s all you’d have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you’ve got all these great jokes.” “They’re”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can't realize what is already here, outside the car window?”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“Dying, he has that look dying people get in their eyes sometimes, happy and sad, tired and spiritually blessed, all at the same time.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“You are a good dad,” I say. “Thanks,” he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he’s heard what he’s come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go. “So.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“He thought she hung the moon. He actually believed this from time to time. He believed the moon wouldn’t have been there but that she’d hung it. He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true. For her, his daughter. He had told her this when she was little to make her happy, and now that he was old he believed it, because it made him happy and because he was so very old. He”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“I'd caught him at a bad time in his life. And this was no fault of his own. It was simply that the world no longer held the magic that allowed
him to live grandly within it.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“My father is on the roof. This is how I remember him sometimes. Well-dressed in a dark suit and shiny, slippery shoes, he is looking left, looking right, looking as far as his eyes will travel. Then, looking down, he sees me, and just as he begins to fall he smiles, and winks. All the way down he's looking at me–smiling, mysterious, mythic, an unknown quantity: my dad.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“The car is my father's magic carpet. Not only does it get him places, but it shows him places.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“...because in my mind—in the memory that has lodged itself imperturbably in my mind, my father resembles Abraham Lincoln, a man with long arms and deep pockets and dark eyes...”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“He was a big fish, even then.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“This wasn't life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“...I'm not laughing. I'm not laughing at all. I'm doing the other thing.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“I look into his gray-blue dying eyes. We’re staring at each other, showing each other our last looks, the faces we’ll take with us into eternity, and I’m thinking how I wish I knew him better, how I wish we’d had a life together, wishing my father wasn’t such a complete and utter goddamn mystery to me...”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“All of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward.”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“Being alone was lonely, but there was an even greater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him. He needed a break. C”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
“So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world. B”
― Daniel Wallace, quote from Big Fish
Daniel Wallace
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“People didn't like having to come up with something smart or helpful or sensitive to say, and they weren't intelligent enough to realize that all we wanted, all I wanted, was to be treated the same as I had been three months before. I wanted to be ignored because of my eccentricities, not because of my brother. And I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling. So, if you feel sorry for someone, don't pretend to be happy. Don't pretend to care only about their problems. People aren't stupid. Not all of us, anyway. If someone's little brother disappears, don't give him a free hamburger to make him feel better-- it doesn't work. It's a good burger, sure, but it means nothing. It means something only to the Mr. Burkes of the world. Offering free meals, free stays in condos in Florida, even free plumbing. And we let them. We let them because they need it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we were useful in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute. So, old ladies, make your casseroles and set them on doorsteps. And old men, grill your burgers and give them to teenagers with cynical worldviews. The world can't be satisfied, but that need to fix it all can.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Where Things Come Back
“—¡Bienvenidos a Intrepidez! —grita Amar—. Donde enfrentas tus miedos y tratas de no morir en el proceso, o te vas como un cobarde.”
― Veronica Roth, quote from The Transfer
“Oči má šedé. Vlasy má rozcuchané a mokré. Prsty má jako buřtíky. Nehty má pokousané a polámané. Zuby má křivé, rozeklané. Má prázdný pohled, a když jste jí poblíž, vzbuzuje ve vás pocit nepřítomnosti, který se nedá slovy vyjádřit. Jejím znakem je prsten s háčkem. Jednoho dne se vám ten háček zadře do srdce. Popsat ji znamená vyjádřit, co je a proč je: přijde, když naděje pomine. Je v tisících čekáren a prázdných ulicích, v budovách ze šedého betonu a v bezejmenných hotelech. Je na druhé straně každého zrcadla. když tě oči, které se na tebe dívají, znají až moc dobře. Stojí a čeká a v jejím postoji ti už bolest neříká, abys žil, a v její přítomnosti je radost nepředstavitelná.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Sandman: Endless Nights
“I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only. Know this at last.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Shirley
“Where he listened some more until I’d pretty well run it down. Then he walked me back and—” “You invite him back in and have sex,” Emma prompted. “Get your own sexy breakfast story. I felt mildly embarrassed, and really grateful, so I give him a little peck. A ‘thanks, pal’ kind of peck. The next thing I know I’m in the middle of a brain-frying, blood-pumping, jungle-drum-beating kiss.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Vision in White
The Goldfinch
Along for the Ride
Beastly
Fablehaven
Red Queen
All the Pretty Horse...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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