“A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”
“President Wilson says a leader must treat public opinion the way a sailor deals with the wind, using it to blow the ship in one direction or another, but never trying to go directly against it.”
“I think more people should shoot newspaper editors...it might improve the press”
“You never get cheered for telling people the situation is not as simple as they think.”
“I could fall for you in a heartbeat”
“The ability to listen to smart people who disagree with you is a rare talent”
“Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts.”
“There’s a saying: ‘If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.”
“In every country, those who were against war had been overruled. The Austrians had attacked Serbia when they might have held back; the Russians had mobilized instead of negotiating; the Germans had refused to attend an international conference to settle the issue; the French had been offered the chance to remain neutral and had spurned it; and now the British were about to join in when they might easily have remained on the sidelines.”
“His talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.”
“A waiter appeared, and Gus said: “Bring coffee for my guests, please, and a plate of ham sandwiches.” He deliberately did not ask them what they wanted. He had seen Woodrow Wilson act like this with people he wanted to intimidate.”
“Marvelous, isn’t it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they’re fucking dead.”
“Mam kissed Ethel and said: “I'm glad to see you settled at last, anyway,” That word ANYWAY carried a lot of baggage, Ethel thought. It meant: “Congratulations, even though you're a fallen woman, and you've got an illegitmate child whose father no one knows, and you're marrying a Jew, and living in London, which is the same as Sodom and Gomorrah.” But Ethel accepted Mam's qualified blessing and vowed never to say such things to her own child.”
“I went to the doctor," said the woman next to Ethel. "I said to him, 'I've got an itchy twat.'"
[...]
She went on: "The doctor says to me, he goes, 'You shouldn't say that, it's a rude word.'"
[...]
"I says to him, 'What should I say, then, doctor?' He says to me, 'Say you've got an itchy finger.'"
[...]
"He says to me, 'Do your finger itch you all the time, Mrs. Perkins, or just now and again?'"
Mildred paused, and the women were silent, waiting for the punch line.
"I says, 'No, doctor, only when I piss through it.”
“A German attack on Russia’s ally France would, in reality, be defensive—but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.”
“If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.”
“—Que Dios nos libre de los hombres con un destino dictado por la voluntad divina”
“But her angry feminism had set as hard as concrete during years of living alongside the tough, hardworking, dirt-poor women of London’s East End. Men often told a fairy tale in which there was a division of labor in families, the man going out to earn money, the woman looking after home and children. Reality was different. Most of the women Ethel knew worked twelve hours a day and looked after home and children as well. Underfed, overworked, living in hovels, and dressed in rags, they could still sing songs and laugh and love their children. In Ethel’s view one of those women had more right to vote than any ten men.”
“You're the one who doesn't understand," Lev said. "In America, I have my own car. There's more food than you can eat, all the booze I want, all the cigarettes I can smoke. I have five suits!"
"What's the point in having five suits?" Grigori said in frustration. "It's like having five beds. You can only use one at a time!”
“It was unladylike even to know the name of your lawyer, let alone to understand your rights under the law. No wonder women were mercilessly exploited.”
“Lenin’s idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.”
“A wine cellar requires order, forethought and good taste,’ the old man used to say. ‘These are the virtues that made Britain great.”
“Monika answered for her father. Giving Walter a conspiratorial grin, she said: “Daddy used to say that if the tsar had been born to a different station in life, he might, with an effort, have become a competent postman.”
“Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best.”
“Era un día soleado de principios de verano, y se oía el canto de los pájaros. En un huerto cercano que hasta entonces se había librado de los bombardeos, los manzanos florecían de forma espectacular. El hombre era el único animal que acababa con la vida de los de su propia especie por millones y que convertía el paisaje en un terreno yermo, plagado de cráteres provocados por las bombas y alambradas de espino. Walter tuvo el pensamiento apocalíptico de que, tal vez, la humanidad se borraría a sí misma de la faz de la tierra y dejaría el mundo a los pájaros y a los árboles. Tal vez eso fuera lo mejor.”
“In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.”
“It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best.”
“The world was changing so fast it was hard to keep up. Grigori had never been inside”
“If you want to change the world, then foreign relations is the field in which you can do the most good—or evil.”
“No, blowing up cities doesn't work, not in the long term. You've got to find something that the people in charge aren't willing to give up. A price they aren't willing to pay.
Which leads us to Talis's first rule for stopping wars: make it personal.”
“Perfect is God’s job. He’s perfect enough for all of us. You need Him and I need Him. If you haven’t made peace with that, then it’s time. Today.”
“The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson.”
“And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.”
“That’s the trouble with you young people.”
Saying young as though it was a bad thing.
“You’re in too darn much of a hurry to notice.”
“Notice what, exactly?”
“The difference,” she’d replied slowly, as if I were particularly stupid, “between what people want you to see, and what’s real.”
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.