“I was, but then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn't exist anymore. That the person I missed didn't exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they couldn't all day long but that never works.”
“In your entire life, you can probably count your true friends on one hand. Maybe even on one finger. Those are the friends you need to cherish, and I wouldn't trade one of them for a hundred of the other kind. I'd rather be completely alone than with a bunch of people who aren't real. People who are just passing time.”
“We all long for what could have been.”
“Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I‘ve been there for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting.”
“I understand how easy it would be to lose yourself in the heart of another. It‘s frightening. Exhilarating. An ocean with no lifeguard.”
“It‘s complicated. I think when bad things happen—whether someone dies or people argue or split up—you get to a point where it‘s just too hard to go back. There‘s so much lost. So many versions of the truth. So many versions of how things might‘ve turned out differently. We all long for what could have been. For some people, it‘s just easier to move forward and try to forget.”
“I wonder how much we don‘t see. How much of our lives we witness and accept as truth when the rest of the iceberg—the heaviest, bulkiest part—is buried and invisible.”
“I remember the feeling even now; an inescapable stickines of each other like magnets on the fridge. It's funny how someone can be such an integral part of your life, like you laugh at the same jokes and eat your ice cream cones the same way and share your toys and dreams and everything but your heartbeats, and then one day - nothing. You share nothing. It's like none of it ever happened.”
“Are we all on the same page, Delilah?
The same page? I don't even think we're even in the same library, but no need to bring that up.”
“Doesn't matter how many people are in the crowd anymore, Delilah. Ten or ten thousand, I'm still only singing for one.”
“you can‘t promise yourself that you‘re not going to fall in love with someone. I‘m not exactly a relationship expert, but I don‘t think it works that way”
“I'd rather be completely alone than with a bunch of people aren't real.”
“I‘m not in love with him. I‘m in love with the way he erases things.”
“I take a deep breath,
count to ten,
and bury it,
way down deep”
“We have the ability to pass our memories on. We just have to tell them to someone.”
“I told him that I would love him with everything I had in me until the very end of everything, and I meant it.”
“the person I missed didn't exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they wouldn't all day long, but that never works.”
“The only thing that's ours to accept is the fact that we don't always get to know the answers.”
“surrounding us is an ocean of mess and misunderstanding, full of pirates and sharks just waiting to see who slips in first”
“Oh, so you're untouchable, huh, Delilah? You and your fucked-up relationship with your mother and everyone else in your life? Great. Does getting pissed at me make it better? does it fix ANYTHING?"
"You! Can't! Fix! Me!”
“It got him killed, but at least he felt something.”
“. . . how easily some things can be broken for good and for bad, and how some things, no matter how shattered, can still go back together. Like Moo, my family may never be as strong as it once was. There are chips and cracks and scars, But some of them can be repaired, piece by piece, rebuilt into something even more cherished and loved and unique.”
“How can I fault her for trying to bury a truth that when exposed to air and sunlight could only hurt the ones she loves?”
“I wonder how many loose buttons there are in this world, just rolling around in a jar without a mate or a blouse to go on. No purpose. Just siting there unnoticed. Forgotten.”
“You know, when a person is murdered, you can miss that person and put all of your anger into hating the killer, even if you don‘t know who the killer is. You also have the choice of forgiveness. But when someone takes her own life, she is the killer.”
“Don't you ever see the bright side of things?" Patrick asks as I mope against the bottom of the ladder.
"Easy to see the bright side when you're getting paid by the hour."
"Delilah, I will gladly give you my fill wage plus a month's supply of your iced choco-nut whatever lattes if you trade places and clothes with my right now."
"You're not wearing a shirt."
"That's the deal, Hannaford," he says.”
“I'm still dropping dishes thinking in slow motion about the GPS woman in Mom's car. I imagine her beckoning me from outside the kitchen window illuminated like some robot-angel calling me forth to the Lexus where she will ferry me off to that planet of monotonous peace that special otherworldly place where all the residents are relaxed and confident and completely numb.
Your life will. Get better in. Six. Point four. Million. Miles.”
“We arrived in Vermont expecting to fix up the old lake house. But in the end, it was the house that fixed us.”
“It was as though my heart made room for two truths that night—one real, the other safe and familiar and desirable.”
“She makes her people work on Sundays?" Rachel whispers, pulling some of my grandmother's old food from he fridge and sniffing it.
"Nah-weekends are optional. They only have to work them if they want to keep their jobs.”
“Once you begin to mass-manufacture anything, by the very nature of the process, you lose the sense of personal attachment you might have to something made by hand.”
“For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”
“For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.”
“for far longer: Blacks were enslaved in this country for 244 years, from 1619 to 1863. As of 2010, they have been free for 147 years.”
“I do know that I fell in love with the moment of falling in love and I wanted to keep that moment alive forever, at the expense of all those moments to follow.”
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.