“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to someone else.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“I watched the way our fingers intertwined, and I thought, What are hands made for but this? For holding. For holding on.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“I loved her,” Robinson said. “And I loved the sick girl you were when I met you, and I loved the good student and the bad driver. I loved the car thief, the hitchhiker, the quoter of novels I haven’t read, and the hater of Slim Jims… Axi Moore, I’ve loved every you there ever was.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Write about us,” Robinson urged. “Tell our story.” And I did it; I told our story. You hold it in your hands.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“I was afraid of what I felt. But was that the only reason it was so hard to admit it to him? Or was I afraid that he didn’t feel the same? Yes, I was definitely afraid of that.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“He was my light, my heart, my beautiful scalawag. And I was—I am—his GG.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“If this was what life was like without words - a life of doing, not just talking - I just might be willing to give them up forever.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“I think about what I didn't say then, which is this: the stars we see aren't even real stars. We see the light that they gave off millions of years ago but that is only now reaching our eyes. We don't see a star as much as a memory.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“It doesn’t matter what the end looks like—what matters is that it came. Bam, you’re done. But life, Axi? There are degrees of life. You can live it well or half-asleep. You can go sledding down a sand dune, or you can spend your life in front of the TV. And I don’t mean to sound like a stupid after-school special, but you have to keep living the way we did these last weeks. Risk, Axi. That’s the secret. Risk everything.”
I nodded, trying not to cry again. “Okay. But I might not keep stealing cars.”
“That’s all right,” he said.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Is it possible that you can love someone more than you love life itself, and yet you're still never going to know for sure everything he's thinking?”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“It was stupidly, infuriatingly impossible. No wonder I hadn’t written anything decent in ages— I couldn’t even figure out how to tell a boy that I loved him.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Don’t drive like you own the road; drive like you own the car.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Speed never killed anyone! It’s suddenly becoming stationary… that’s what gets you.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“That if I had to choose between dying tomorrow or spending the rest of my life without him, I would seriously consider picking imminent death.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“There was another thing I hadn’t counted on. And that was falling in love, as fast and irrevocably as you would fall off a cliff, and realizing that loving someone might mean to simultaneously want to slug them and hold them and possibly have to watch them die.… I hadn’t counted on that.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Regret is a waste of time.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Whether or not he wanted me the same way I wanted him, we were in this together—that was what Robinson had said. It had never occurred to me before what a complicated word together was.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Because today after all, is all we knew.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Like our bodies and our hearts had to be together to make one whole, perfect person.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“I think it was love at first sight for both of us; it just took us a little while to figure it out. That was understandable, considering we were being stuck with needles, shot through with radioactive particles, possibly poisoned by the horrific substances the hospital tried to pass off as food, and then, when we got discharged, running away and stealing cars together.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“If life were a movie, we'd have had what they call a “meet cute".”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Hey, Axi. What’s the difference between a doctor and a lawyer?” I knew this joke—it was one of Robinson’s standards. And I was only half-surprised he was trotting it out now. Playing along, I said, “I don’t know. What?” “A lawyer will rob you; a doctor will rob you and kill you, too.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“I picked a star and wished as hard as i could that somehow i could protect him from what was on the horizon”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“Michelangelo didn’t show David triumphant, the way every other sculptor did. He showed David before he fought Goliath—when David believed he was doomed and went into battle anyway.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“My dear, there is no universal secret. There's only the secret each writer discovers for herself. The path forward”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“IF YOU ASK ME A PERSON DOESNT GET ENOUGH SURPRISES IN A LIFE TIME.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“FYI, car crashes kill way more kids than cancer does. Those crosses you see on the side of the highway, the little white ones hung with fading silk flowers? They’re for people my age. (“People who were texting,” my dad liked to remind me—because he never wanted to blame Budweiser for anything.)”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“AS WE LAY THERE WE FELT LIKE WE WERE EXTENSTIONS OF EACH OTHER, LIKE OUR BODIES AND OUR HEARTS HAD TO BE TOGETHER TO MAKE ONE WHOLE PERFECT PERSON.”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
“A small, weak part that just wanted to be a little girl again, with a family that wasn't sick and broken. But that sure wasn't going to happen, was it?”
― James Patterson, quote from First Love
James Patterson
Born place: in Newburgh, New York, The United States
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“Then it dawned on me that men throughout the country had to know about nu shu (women's written word). How could they not? They wore it on their embroidered shoes. They saw us weaving our messages into cloth. They heard us singing our songs and showing off our third-day wedding books. Men just considered our writing beneath them.
It is said men have the hearts of iron, while women are made of water. This comes through men's writing and women's writing. Men's writing has more than 50,000 characters, each uniquely different, each with deep meanings and nuances. Our women's writing has 600 characters, which we use phonetically, like babies to create about 10,000 words. Men's writing takes a lifetime to learn and understand. Women's writing is something we pick up as girls, and we rely on the context to coax meaning. Men write about the outer realm of literature, accounts, and crop yields; women write about the inner realm of children, daily chores, and emotions. The men in the Lu household were proud of their wives' fluency in nu shu and dexterity in embroidery, though these things had as much importance to survival as a pig's fart.”
― Lisa See, quote from Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
“Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from American Psycho
“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Infinite Jest
“So what do I wish for? Something I'm not sure I want? Someone I'm not sure I need? Or someone I know I can't have?”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from Anna and the French Kiss
“The sound of distant breakers made her heart ache with melancholy. She was in the mood when the sea has a saddening effect upon the nerves. It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.”
― Emmuska Orczy, quote from The Scarlet Pimpernel
Magic Rises
The Assassin's Curse
The Railway Children
Good Grief
Wanted
The Crow RoadBookQuoters 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.
