0 pages
Rating: (2.5K votes)
“For the Vanderbilts lived in a day when flaunting one’s money was not only accepted but celebrated. What may have started as playacting, as dressing up as dukes and princesses for fancy dress balls in fairytale palaces, soon developed into a firm conviction that they were indeed the new American nobility.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“GENTLEMEN You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. C. Vanderbilt”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“If ever Scott Fitzgerald needed evidence to substantiate his aphorism that “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it was here in spades in this portrait gallery of extravagant crazies that is the unique saga of the Vanderbilt family.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do till I have done it.”62”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“A dinner invitation once accepted is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“In the hidden reaches where memory probes lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“Found in a small stone cave bitten from the roadside, stitchless save for his great outsized boots and a plague of flies, fat on the human scrappage of dinners long past, Toad squatted in the slitted stomach of a warm child, eating loudly the face of her hapless, headless father, who sat a good foot off the ground impaled up the ass on a pointed post.”
― Nick Cave, quote from And the Ass Saw the Angel
“F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers
“This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking - someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.”
― Denis Johnson, quote from Tree of Smoke
“What's a dissertation?"
"If Satan gave you instructions for writing the book report from Hell, it would closely resemble those of a Ph.D. dissertation.”
― Tiffany Reisz, quote from The Saint
“His face, like everything she knew about him, was purely contradictory. That cherubic mouth with those penetrating eyes: he was too lovely to be menacing, but too intense to be innocent.”
― Priscilla Glenn, quote from Back to You
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.