“But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.
Instead I had Hell.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“Well, I’ve learnt this much: it doesn’t matter
what it costs, it’s worth paying the price. You can’t live cheap
and you can’t live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you’ve
paid it, that’s what I reckon.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.
Just the bush.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“I guess our fate is up to us now. And we’ve
been there before, of course. There’s something quite comforting
about it in a strange way. We’ve learnt a few things. We know we’ve
got a few things going for us. A bit of imagination, a bit of guts
sometimes, a bit of spark.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“There's nothing like the very early morning. It's the sweetness of the air, the sweet coolness; it's the bubbling of the creek which, for some strange reaction, always sounds more energetic than it does later on; it's the gargling of the magpies.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“What we needed was a two-sided badge that said ‘Mature’ on one side and ‘Childish’ on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend
“Wind does not need translation. It speaks the language of men, of animals and birds, of rocks and trees and earth and sky and water. It does not eat or sleep, or take shelter from the weather. It is the weather.
And it lives.”
― Jessica Day George, quote from Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow
“I had these Whitman coin boards with slots for the coins. I said to Don, ‘It looks to me like we could take these coin boards and use them as molds for casting slugs.’ “Danly was the brains of the operation. And so, sure enough, he learned how to pour these molds for casting slugs, and I supplied the coin boards. We would try to use the slugs for vending machines for soda pop and things like that. Our basic formula was to have our income in currency and our outgo in slugs.”
― Alice Schroeder, quote from The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
“İnsan ne tuhaf bir yaratıktır. Cinayetle haşır neşir, kim bilir kaç kez bir ailenin babasının, gözü yaşlı eşi ya da çaresiz çocukları için hiçbir pişmanlık yahut acıma duygusu hissetmeden, hiçbir kişisel düşmanlıklarının olmadığı bir adamın canını almış bu adamların, müziğin tatlı ve dokunaklı nağmelerine kulak verince adeta gözleri yaşarıyordu.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Valley of Fear
“What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Joke
“There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.”
― Frank McCourt, quote from Teacher Man
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.
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