“Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“Personally, I don’t think it right to make up things about real people—although I suppose there’s an argument for saying that once you’re dead you’re not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both).”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“Nor, says Nora, do we want commonplace tales of hausfrau Angst, of the woman heroically making over her life with a handsome new lover, a beautiful child, a happy ending. Instead, we shall have murder and mayhem, plots and sub-plots, a mad woman in the attic, purloined diamonds, lost birthrights, heroic dogs, a soupçon of sex, a suspicion of philosophy.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses - the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
“Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob – they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird
Kate Atkinson
Born place: in York, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 1, 1951
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“...the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from Exit West
“Chris’s willowy fingers dug into his thighs and hers closed over his ears and he stopped hearing the soup sound of her mouth and felt the brief pain of her teeth nipping the drawn foreskin and the throb of his groin pumping the teeming fluid into her throat, stopping her gentle voice and dripping from her chords that sung the music of her lonely heart. Her hair lay athwart in clean strands on his body and for the next silent minute he was the sanest man on earth, bled of his seed, rid of his mind.”
― J.P. Donleavy, quote from The Ginger Man
“As always she was kitted out in the pristine pastels of baby clothes and her little plimsolls were so white my eyes ached. To look directly at them one would need a piece of cardboard with a hole in it, of the type used for viewing a solar eclipse.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“Experience informs intuition. But it does more than that: Experience sets the frame within which we analyze and interpret what we perceive. You would no doubt expect, for instance, that the "wild child" raised by a pack of wolves would interpret the world from a perspective that differs substantially from your own. Even less extreme comparisons, such as those between people raised in very different cultural traditions, serve to underscore the degree to which our experiences determine our interpretive mindset.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
“During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Addicted to You
Revan
Too Consumed
Something Real
Outer Dark
The Girl Who Came Ho...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.
