“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally it sold about three million copies. We”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“a degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to begin learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“Don’t you see, Anthony? For all the evangelicals’ talk about this nation being founded on religious principles…this being a Christian nation and all…most of the Founding Fathers were like Jefferson…atheists, pointy-headed intellectuals, Unitarians…”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“Natalie’s father had a saying for that behavior—Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Carrion Comfort
“The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from South of Broad
“Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Cathedral
“لن نُظهر أفضل ما لدينا حتى نُسحق تمامًا”
― Bohumil Hrabal, quote from Too Loud a Solitude
“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.
Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.
Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?
At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego.
Just what kind of narrative?
It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
“We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, quote from The Law
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.