“The plane blew up.”
“I wonder what happened to all the other people?”
As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I hadn’t said that. I decided shy people shouldn’t try to make conversation, not even in an emergency. If I manage to talk to strangers at all, nervousness always makes me say the wrong thing.”
― Ann Halam, quote from Dr. Franklin's Island
“But I suppose I’m a typical nerd, good at the details, not very smart at seeing the larger picture. I’d gone in for the competition because I liked my science teacher, and it had been like doing any interesting piece of homework. I had not thought it through. I had never sat myself down and said to myself, hold on, Semirah, what if you win? You are shy. How are you going to survive for three weeks surrounded by total strangers?”
― Ann Halam, quote from Dr. Franklin's Island
“I walked all the way around the zoo, and then came back to a girl with a round face and fluffy hair, who looked like a baby owl. I like owls. I was about to say hello when along came Very Cool Girl, with her beautiful hair swinging. She smiled at me, and so did the baby owl. But oh no…My throat closed up. I simply could not speak. I can’t talk to strangers! I swerved off, and pretended I’d been headed for a nearby drinks machine.”
― Ann Halam, quote from Dr. Franklin's Island
“I’d given up on the animal identities, so I didn’t try to think of one; but I decided I’d sit down, not next to him but a couple of seats away, to drink my can of Coke. I would try to look casually inviting, and maybe we could strike up a conversation. I sat down, giving a sigh that might have been a sort of noncommittal half-hello. He looked up from the game he was playing on his GameBoy and stared at me, narrow-eyed. His expression said very clearly, I’ve got your number, Unpopular Girl. Stay away from me.”
― Ann Halam, quote from Dr. Franklin's Island
“Good morning,” I said awkwardly.
Being shipwrecked doesn’t make shyness any easier.”
― Ann Halam, quote from Dr. Franklin's Island
“We came across a rucksack, wedged in among the coral. It was fastened up, but it seemed to have been invaded by some weird fluffy white sea creature that was trying to get out.
“What’s that?” said Arnie, poking it.
Miranda and I took a second look, and started to giggle. “It’s tampons,” I said. “Expanding widthways when wet—”
“Yecch!”
― Ann Halam, quote from Dr. Franklin's Island
Ann Halam
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“OPENING THE DOOR to her mother’s bedroom, Haley was stunned to see that her mother was awake. Crisp, dog-eared black-and-white photos and hundreds of newer color photographs were scattered all over the bed and floor. An empty scrapbook lay on her mother’s bureau next to a box of tissues.”
― Jennifer Jaynes, quote from Never Smile at Strangers
“The loss inside him kept piling—vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls,”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character
“The pasta had a consistency somewhere between soggy paper and rubber eggs, with a taste combining the best of each. The sauce tasted like glue flavored with lemonade.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., quote from The Parafaith War
“When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. [...] The murder itself is the end of the story. It's Zero Hour.”
He paused.
“It's Zero Hour now.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Towards Zero
Hard Contact
If I Were You
More Than Forever
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Brick Lane
Judgment in DeathBookQuoters 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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