“You do not want a war.
You have known violence, you have suffered loss, but you have seen nothing of war. War is not just the business of death; it is the anti-thesis of life. Hope, tortured and flayed, reason, dismembered, grinning at its limbs in its lap. Decency, raped to death...
You will be a murderer and more.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“I'm not a leader now. I'm a whole damn army.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“Nobody ever called me any OH MY GOD you mean that guy that one that set himself on FIRE!"
"As I said, fanatics."
"But he set himself on fire!"
"Centuries of useless, obsessive waiting. Makes a human-"
"HE SET HIMSELF ON FIRE!
"Maybe he was cold.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“They'll all be waiting. Waiting for me to fall.
So, come on , guys. I'm just one girl. No big hero, no protector of justice, not even a bona fide one-hundred-percent slayer. So what are you waiting for?
Take me on.
Hurt my world.
I dare you.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“So, what's first?"
"Dexterity. I throw things at you. You avoid them."
"You're not a complicated person, are you? Let's do it."
20 seconds later
"You hib me wib a girder!"
"How many claws am I holding up?"
"You hib my face wib a whole girder!"
"You were meant to duck."
"Can we skip degsteriby?”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“They come. Sooner than I'd thought, more than I'd even begun to fear. They come looking for death.
And Death is psyched to see 'em.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“I'm pissed like this rutting beast can't conceive - I'm a lifetime of pissed, of strong, of muscle built over bruise, I'm slick with power and feel the fight as it changes...
As it flows...
...Everything into place, perfect, and I finally do what I was born to do.
I slay.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]
“But you, Holmes-you have changed very little-save for that horrible goatee."
"These are the sacrifices one makes for one's country, Watson," said Holmes, pulling at his little tuft. "To-morrow it will be but a dreadful memory.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from His Last Bow
“It's easier to fake it. When you fake it for sixteen years, it becomes part of you, something you don't think about.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from Breathing Underwater
“We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Edible Woman
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.