“...in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.”
“For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean son of a bitch of a path.”
“I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.”
“What has been is no more. Change has come.”
“Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?”
“...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”
“What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.”
“Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears.”
“Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.
People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.
Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.”
“Anyway,” he said, “if somebody doesn’t belong in the world, there’s no door they can throw him out. They can’t take the world away from him and put him somewhere different. The worst thing they can do is kill him. That’s all.”
“JEALOUSY IS A TERRIBLE THING. It keeps you up at night, it demands tremendous energy in order to remain alive, and so you have to want to feed it, nurture it—and by so wanting, you have to acknowledge that you are a bitter, petty person. It changes you. It changes the way you view the world; minor irritations become major catastrophes; celebrations become trials.”
“I knew that hunched shoulders, hanging hair, and eyes on the ground were fairly reliable signs of a girl dejected, a girl who needed to be approached and jollied into a nice talk or a nice cup of tea; whereas a back-flung head, with eyes closed and a secret smile on the upturned face, was the signal of someone who needed to be left alone with her thoughts.”
“On the wall was a dress that I embroidered. It said "Ich Habe Genug." Which is a Bach Cantata. Which I once thought meant "I've had it, I can't take anymore, give me a break." But I was wrong.
It means "I have enough." And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. But I will go out and buy a hat.”
“Her husband had archaic ideas about jewels; a man bought them for his wife in acknowledgement of things he could not gracefully utter.”
“I was just going to stand here and watch it happen. I wasn’t going to say a fucking thing. Why? Because what did it matter? What did any of it matter?”
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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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.