Quotes from Big Machine

“A little style is a good thing, but you can’t trust a person who won’t be ugly in front of you.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Some people act like it’s a sign of weakness if you want to belong, but I think most human beings yearn to find at least one open door in their lifetime.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“The poor aren't defeated. We're domesticated.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Oppression doesn’t make people noble. Give any of us a little comfort, and we’ll kill to keep it. The despised become despicable.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“It’s easier to hold onto a bad idea if you never share it, and it’s harder to defend one if you let it out.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.
Was this the heart I wanted measured?”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“There are people who say life is dull. Just a series of mundane events. But I can’t agree. Things happen. Bet on that.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Don’t focus on the mishaps; consider the pleasures instead.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“I don’t have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Before September 11, the skinny, jittery black guy made security think one thing: drug mule. But after the attacks, security only cared about bombs. So it was the Arab guys, the Puerto Ricans and Indians, even white men, that got searched. I was too dark to make people worry on a plane. Still caused fear in elevators.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“The shame wasn't in discovering that she had a price; everyone had one of those. Maybe it was just in learning, so concretely, that this was what she cost.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Time alone is pornography for people with families.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Human beings are no damn good,” he said. “We are even worse than animals. We like ...”
He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.
“We like monsters,” he said.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“I don’t know what to say about the hygiene of the male species.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Fuck the meek. The despised will inherit the earth!”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“People hear that you grew up religious, and they can’t imagine you’d have a complex relationship with faith. If you believe one part, you must believe it all. But who gets more chances to see the absurdities than the devout? An answer that’s satisfying on Sunday becomes contradictory by Wednesday night. Belief is a wrestling match that lasts a lifetime.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“A little style is a good thing, but you can't trust someone who won't be ugly in front of you.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“This was one benefit of being a grown man and not a kid: I wanted to impress this woman, but not to the point of getting myself killed.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Seeing America by bus is like touring the Louvre in a Porta Potti.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“And you can fool yourself if you’re raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn’t true. We’re rubes too.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“Think of King Jesus as our greatest doubter. Who saw the order of society and taught us to defy it. Who saw the ugly urges in ourselves and taught us to resist them. As we navigate through the powerful tides, doubt is our rudder.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“It’s frightening to step into a place and understand you’re a victim. I’m not talking about a bad feeling or a vague sense. I mean knowing. A quick fire runs through your heart and limbs. You go stiff because you’re aware something’s about to happen, but you can’t think clearly enough to escape.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“The poor aren’t defeated, we’re domesticated.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

“It's hard to fake faith, in yourself or anything else.”
― Victor LaValle, quote from Big Machine

About the author

Popular quotes

“I'm going to cover the whole world like it was a neighborhood, and in airplanes and raing cars, not on foot!”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History

“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo

“More people worship the rising than the setting sun,”
― Tom Holland, quote from Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“You are my other half, Amy. I have to protect you.”
― Lisa Renee Jones, quote from Infinite Possibilities

“I've created a monster, haven't I?" said Merlin, staring at the animated figure incredulously.

"I think that, technically, I was already a monster," the dragon replied. "Now I am a monster with social networking skills. Or I would be, if I had a Twitter account. And possibly a Facebook. Do I want a Facebook? Is it a book of faces? Is it the same as MySpace? Which of course begs the question: what is MySpace?”
― FayJay, quote from The Student Prince

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.