“The human mind is incredible. It can do nothing without belief, yet practically anything with it.”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“People who love each other can no more keep from communicating than from breathing.”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“Must a man then live as his fellows live, and never reach beyond?”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“There are different kinds of truth. And if our kind is more mature than theirs, it's so only because we know that.”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“What is it, I wonder, that makes two people suddenly become important to each other? So important that everything else around them just fades away?”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“I know little of magic, Lady,' he said haltingly. 'I am but a woodcutter's son, and there is much that is not given to men to understand; but of this I am sure: there is more to things than we imagine. Beyond the stars are worlds without number, perhaps, and had I never sought to look beyond my own I should be the poorer for it.”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“It is the only happiness now possible to me, to know that all is well with you”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“But a light now waxed within him at the knowledge that such wonders as he had been shown could exist.”
― Sylvia Engdahl, quote from Enchantress from the Stars
“why would it? He had won, and”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, quote from Hold the Dream
“With tears in her eyes, Alexandra assured him that the husband and father was infinitely more precious to her than the tsar whose throne she had shared. Nicholas finally broke. Laying his head on his wife’s breast, he sobbed like a child.”
― Robert K. Massie, quote from Nicholas and Alexandra
“Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind. This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of her self the night before were difficult to reassemble. She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day.
The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity of the face’s lines, disturbing the purity of its forms.
She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.
Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair, and costume, for a fissure through which to explode.
What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty emerged which had been frayed and marred by anxiety.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from A Spy in the House of Love
“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .”
― Emil M. Cioran, quote from A Short History of Decay
“But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more “natural” additions and alterations.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
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.