“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
“Shiftrunes?” “Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
“Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why the psychiatrists say, "Love or perish." Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Blackbird House
“As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.”
― Matthew Henry, quote from Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible
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.