“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“You asked me, 'Do you call this living?" And I answer: Yes, it is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now! I can't live with that.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“Only you have to keep practicing and remembering.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“Es extremadamente listo, considerando lo estúpido que es.”
― Frederik Pohl, quote from Gateway
“I enjoy working for my heat. I don't just press a button or twist a thermostat dial. I use the big crosscut saw and the axe, and while I'm getting my heat supply I'm working up an appetite that makes simple food just as appealing as anything a French chef could create.”
― quote from One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
“The Professor looked like a Protestant saint when the cannibal offered him the choice of taking six wives or being boiled alive. He wanted to mortify some flesh, but he didn't know which.”
― Joyce Cary, quote from The Horse's Mouth
“If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“The untarred road wound away up the valley, innocent as yet of motor-cars, wound empty away to other villages, which lay empty too, the hot day long, waiting for the sight of a stranger. We”
― Laurie Lee, quote from Cider With Rosie
“At first it appeared as if something with wings had fallen from above... perhaps an angel who had faltered then drowned, in tears of this poor tired world.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The River King
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.