“There never was a story that was happy through and through.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carried a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“She risked her life to put your mind at rest,' Evgenia said. 'How great is love!”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“You have life written all over you. Some people bear tragedy on their faces; loss, death, whatever it might be. But you have life.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“Slowly he had learned that there is a world beneath the visible one, and that people, some people at least, have a different life, that they carry inside them.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“Love, he decided, is not about how much someone else cares for you, it's about how much you care for someone else.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone.
In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and
telephones, murder and assassination.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“The bear, which by now was as large as the cathedral on Catherine’s canal, rose on its hind legs like a dancing bear in a street market. For a moment the sun was blotted out by its size, and then it fell. As it fell, it came apart. It disintegrated. It fell like brown snow, but each flake was a person. The bear had been one hundred thousand people, and now the people came to earth, tumbling into the snowy streets of the city and picking themselves up, laughing at it all. Far from being hurt, they realised that they felt strong. But, like the bear, they felt hungry. They ran through the streets, swarming like bees, joining others who had emerged when the sun had. It was chaos.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“The time for princes and tsars and grand duchesses and especially holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, of murder and assassination. The bear had already become what it had been waiting to be, and the men who set it on its journey changed too. Lev became Trotsky, Vladimir took the name Lenin, and they stepped into a bright and furious modern world; blood red, and snow white.”
― Marcus Sedgwick, quote from Blood Red, Snow White
“She hardly knew what to do, it had been so long since such strong feelings had borne down on her. It was like carrying another creature inside her, and nothing so benign and natural as a baby. Undamped, untamed, the pain and exultation of her attachment to them blew through Liga like a storm-wind carrying sharp leaves and struggling birds. How long she had known her daughters, and how well, and in what extraordinary vividness and detail! How blithely she had done the work of rearing them - it seemed to her now that she had had cause for towering, disabling anxieties about them; that what had seemed little plaints and sorrows in their childhoods were in fact off-drawings from much greater tragedies, from which she had tried to keep them but could not. And the joys she had had of them, too, their embraces and laughter - it was all too intense to be endured, this connection with them, which was a miniature of the connection with the forces that drove planet and season - the relentlessness of them, the randomness, the susceptibility to glory, to accident, to disaster. How soft had been her life in that other place, how safe and mild! And here she was, back where terrors could immobilize her, and wonders too; where life might become gulps of strong ale rather than sips of bloom-tea. She did not know whether she was capable of lifting the cup, let alone drinking the contents.”
― Margo Lanagan, quote from Tender Morsels
“A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it… the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts…. It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932
“Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Unseen Academicals
“Gardening is the purest human pleasure. Francis Bacon”
― Laura Frantz, quote from Love's Reckoning
“You never made me weak," he said, giving her a little shake. "You make me strong." His big hands smoothed up her arms. "Just knowing you're in this world makes me want to live in it, makes me want to fight.”
― Kristen Callihan, quote from Moonglow
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.