“There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don’t know whether the plague was directed toward humanity—or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City
“There is power in a Lady who trusts in God-a lady who has put all her eggs in God’s basket. Women possess some gift that touches the heart of God. This gift is so powerful that Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who was known for his great compassion found himself needing the intercession of women to tap into this power. The Lord asked Him to send for the women to let them take up wailing as God knew His ears are open to the cry of distressed women”
― Mary Maina, quote from The Proverbs 31 Lady: Unveiling Her Secrets Before Saying I Do
“At the same time, he expressed accurately and powerfully the state of mind of the countless underground fighters dying in the battle against Nazism. Why did they throw their lives into the scale? Why did they accept torture and death? They had no point of support like the Fuhrer for the Germans or the New Faith for the Communists. It is doubtful whether most of them believed in Christ. It could only have been loyalty, loyalty to something called fatherland or honor, but something stronger than any name. In one of his stories, a young boy, tortured by the police and knowing that he will be shot, gives the name of his friend because he is afraid to die alone. They meet before the firing squad, and the betrayed forgives his betrayer. This forgiveness cannot be justified by any utilitarian ethic; there is no reason to forgive traitors. Had this story been written by a Soviet author, the betrayed would have turned away with disdain from the man who had succumbed to base weakness.”
― Czesław Miłosz, quote from The Captive Mind
“You’re not fine, Paul,” he replies. “You can barely walk. You don’t leave this house unless forced to. All you do is read and mope—”
“Brood. I prefer brood. More manly than mope!”
― Lauren Layne, quote from Broken
“Acım tıpkı organlarımı kemiren bir yaratık gibi hala canlı.Ölmeyecek.Ölmeyi reddediyor.Onu oraya sen koydun, sen ektin, embriyoya onca yılın besinini verdin.Ve sonra yürüyüp gittin.
Bana iyilik yaptığını söyledin.Şimdi ayrılmak daha iyi, eğer bu iş uzarsa sadece daha fazla acı verecek, dedin.
Acı çekmenin ne olduğunu bilmiyorsun…”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from Presumed Guilty
“The essential oddity of human communication does not prevent its effectiveness, if retarded in efficiency.”
― Edward Southgate, quote from Great Pleasures
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.