“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“Doesn´t she have diarrhea of the mouth?”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“The cold in her makes cold in me.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“I hid my wounds because I was ashamed...but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced..”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“...there is a piece of me missing so big that the pain doubles me over, clawing at my gut...”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“She wants to be someone else, somewhere else, and I can't blame her.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“...I had enough of real life everyday to last me forever.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“Sometimes you say a word so many times that it loses its meaning...”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“stayed because I thought things would get better, or at least not worse.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say “Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?” And they hesitate. And then I say, “What’s the matter? Why are you hesitating?” And so often people say, “I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. I don’t think I’m ready to say I’m a Christian now.” And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, “Well, I don’t think I’ good enough,” but it’s a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, “I’m not good enough; Oh, I’m not good enough,” you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you’re better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? It doesn’t matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure
“For instance, the headmistress, Miss Moore. I knew right away that she had come to Antigua from England, for she looked like a prune left out of its jar a long time and she sounded as if she had borrowed her voice from an owl. The way she said, "Now, girls. . ." When she was just standing still there, listening to some of the other activities, her gray eyes going all around the room hoping to see something wrong, her throat would beat up and down as if a fish fresh out of water were caught up inside.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, quote from Annie John
“I'm a fool, the new day rises on the world and on my foolish life: I'm a fool, I loved the blue dawns over racetracks and made a bet Ioway was sweet like its name, my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers, the wetness on the wire fence bugled me to belief, I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss - I am made of Cody, too -”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Visions of Cody
“Death is the only limit to the road you travel.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Hand of Oberon
“I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
― John Taylor Gatto, quote from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
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.