“The last thing I wanted was to fall in love
because, deep down, I remembered that love hurt.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Sky, you can't ignore this!" He stood under the street lamp, sleet settling in his hair, hands fisted at his side. "You're mine - you have to be.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“You lit me up like Vegas”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Victor patted my hand. 'I like you, Sky. You're a fighter.'
'I am, aren't I? Hear that, Zed? No more bambi comparisons. I'm a Rottweiler -with a temper.'
'A very small Rottweiler,' said Zed, still not convinced.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“I'm crazy, Zed.' There, I'd admitted it.
'Uh-huh. And I'm crazy too -about you.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Music is not take it or leave it; Music is life or death!”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“What were we talking before I was so rudely interrupted by a flying citrus ?”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“like Belgian chocolate—absolutely sinful and completely irresistible’.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Yeah, well, not many boys take their girls out on a duck shoot with them as target for a first date. You have to give me points for style.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Excuse me, Mr Tall-and-Good-looking Wolfman, but can you help the English midget reach the sauce?’ I think not.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Did you know that chocolate had special chemicals in it to make you feel happy?"
"I don't need an excuse for chocolate.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“You have half our gifts. I the other. Together we make a whole. Together we are much more powerful.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“I...I'm sorry to come like this,' I murmured.
'Stop being so damn British about it-you don't need to apologize. Ssh, it's fine.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“I really, really like you, Sky. But if I don't stop now, your dad will kill me and that will be the end of a beautiful friendship.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“If I'm a tuning fork, you're the perfect A, making me hum.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“I'm a big boy. I can take it.
You got into a fight.
I'm also stupid.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“What’s nefarious?’
‘I don’t know, but my grandma accuses me of having them when she thinks I done something bad and it sounds good.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“You’re a bright girl, aren’t you? No pun intended.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“She looked fragile. Alone. Prisoner in the room through the mirror; an Alice who never made it back through the looking-glass.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“I'm not afraid of the dark.
I am. Humor me.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Get out of here. Yoda so does not have an English accent!'
'Other than that you're saying I'm a dead ringer?'
'If the shoe fits.'
'Sheesh, I hate tall girls.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Yeah, really scary," agreed Zoe, struggling not to laugh. "Like Bambi with an Uzi.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Think about it: the chances of meeting your other half are tiny. Most of us are doomed to knowing there's something better out there but we can't discover it.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“They grabbed me and up I went. My shriek probably could've been heard in England. It certainly brought the basketball coach and the rest of the boys running in the belief that someone was being brutally murdered.
I don't think Mrs. Green will be picking me for the squad.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Fine, I'll teach you,'
'Besides, there's only so many times a girl wants to fall on her butt in front of the boy she's out to impress.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Wisdom you speak, Obi Tina.'
'None of that - I'm the one who gets to speak backwards - no, we're both wrong - that's the little green guy, Yoda.'
'You're right. So I just get to pout and act badly when you try and teach me anything.'
'Try channelling Luke rather than Annakin - the outcome is better.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“Zed : Penguins, such fascinating creatures, but I didn’t know you were studying them. What class is that you’re taking?
Sky: The ‘we-stupid-looking-creature-should-stick-together’ class.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“I shuffled to the back. ‘You there—new girl. I can’t see you.’ Precisely: that had been the idea.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“-Nosotros,querrás decir -me corrigió mientras reía
-.Si tu don estuviera en libertad, brillarías como yo lo hago cuando estás conmigo.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“-Nosotros,querrás decir -me corrigió mientras reía-.Si tu don estuviera en libertad, brillarías como yo lo hago cuando estás contigo.”
― Joss Stirling, quote from Finding Sky
“He didn't understand why everyone fussed about taking clean clothes out of a drawer. Underclothes smelled a lot more interesting after the female wore them.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh
“[A Chinese Restaurant.] Roma is seated alone at the booth. Lingk is at the booth next to him. Roma ,i>is talking to him.
* * *
Roma: . . . Eh? What I’m saying, what is our life? (Pause.) It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank,/i> closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ’em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: “There is a one-in-a million chance that so and so will happen. . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me. . . .” No. We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is “There is a one-in-so-and-so chance that this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me. . . .” But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.)”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross
“لقد قرأت بعض الكتب فقط للتقليل من جهلي !”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey
“Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning
“There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying
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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