“Dear Natasha,
It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like.
This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“In the naivete of their youth, they believed Fate to be a kind mistress. None of them were prepared for the beast that was about to pick them up by the throats and shake them until their teeth rattled.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“He was seven years old the summer that his life ended. He'd always felt like his life was taken the moment that truck rammed into his father and sister. Or at least, the life he would have had was ended before it even began.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“Kid's little binges, his forays into intoxication were affecting everyone now. They were affecting their goals and dreams. They were affecting Natasha. She was probably drinking just to deal with him.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“But like all moments trapped in time, that moment would end and Joey Boldt, as all the greats before him did, would begin to understand that clinging too tightly to anything results in Time and Fate shaking you until you can't hold on any longer. And then, when you are knocked for a six and lose your grip, they allow you to spiral into a freefall where men are broken and legends are made.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.”
― John Hersey, quote from Hiroshima
“He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency?”
― Francine Rivers, quote from A Voice in the Wind
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from The Book of Disquiet
“As I trailed dumbly up the next flight it seemed strange that we had never said goodbye. We didn’t know when, if ever, we would see each other again yet neither of us had said a word. I don’t know if Siegfried wanted to say anything but there was a lot try trying to burst from me.
I wanted to thank him for being a friend as well as a boss, for teaching me so much, for never letting me down. There were other things, too, but I never said them.
Come to think of it, I’ve never even thanked him for that fifty pounds…until now.”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful
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.