“To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“There's nothing more stubborn than a fact. That is why you hate them so much. They offend you.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“Trust but check. Check on those we trust.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“—Isn’t this how it starts? You have a cause you believe in, a cause worth dying for. Soon, it’s a cause worth killing for. Soon, it’s a cause worth killing innocent people for.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“The price of this story was the audience's innocence.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“His hate wasn't professional; it was an obsession, a fixation, as if unrequited love had grown awful, twisted into something ugly.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“If he wanted to hear about love, the first verse was his to sing.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“Leo, I have another secret. I've fallen in love with you.”
"I've always loved you.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“The survival of their political system justified anything. The promise of a golden age where none of this brutality would exist, where everything would be in plenty and poverty would be a memory, justified anything.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“sentimentality could blind a man to the truth. Those who appear the most trustworthy deserve the most suspicion.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“....a man both handsome and repulsive in equal measure-as if his good looks were plastered over a rotten centre, a hero's face with a henchman's heart.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“The duty of an investigator was to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered then they hadn’t scratched deep enough.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“Leo had no idea what the real crime statistics were. He had no desire to find out since those who knew were probably liquidated on a regular basis.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“ruthlessness. Leo was trapped. He couldn’t claim the”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“Precautionary measure. With those words any deaths could be justified. Better to destroy your own people than there be a chance a German soldier might find a loaf of bread.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“We should measure a man by what they’re prepared to do themselves. Not by what they’re prepared to have others do for them.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“There was no chance you could be found innocent inside these walls. It was an assembly line of guilt.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“Leo’s very existence had been a kind of perpetual punishment for Vasili. So, then, why did he miss him?”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“Was the difference merely that Vasili was senselessly cruel while he’d been idealistically cruel? One was an empty, indifferent cruelty while the other was a principled, pretentious cruelty which thought of itself as reasonable and necessary.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“For decades no one had taken action according to what they believed was right or wrong but by what they thought would please their Leader. People”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“By his count there were forty-three in total. Nesterov had reached over, taken another pin from the box, and stuck it into the center of Moscow, making Arkady child 44.”
― Tom Rob Smith, quote from Child 44
“I wish I could love people as you do, Molly!'
'Don't you?' said the other, in surprise.
'No. A good number of people love me, I believe, or at least they think they do; but I never seem to care much for any one. I do believe I love you, little Molly, whom I have only known for ten days, better than any one.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, quote from Wives and Daughters
“Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from The Lords of Discipline
“Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.
That was good.”
― Stephen King, quote from Lisey's Story
“I have found my star. She is beauty and grace. Elegance and goodness. My laughter in winter. She is courageous and strong. Bold and tempting. Unlike any other in all the universe, and I cannot touch her. I dare not even try." [Zarek]”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Dance with the Devil
“I opened the door and went inside, calling "I'm home!" Except that I wasn't, really. Because home meant something else to me now, and had for quite awhile. And he didn't live there anymore.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Twilight
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.