Quotes from Gateway

Frederik Pohl ·  278 pages

Rating: (33.9K votes)


“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


About the author

Frederik Pohl
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date November 26, 1919
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Tail held high, Brokentail’s tiny sister pattered forward into the circle to stand beside him. “I give you a life for love of kin,” she mewed, the wisdom in her voice startling Yellowfang as it came from so small a body. “And as Clan leader, remember that every Clan cat is your kin.”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Yellowfang's Secret


“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.

Just the bush.”
― John Marsden, quote from Darkness, Be My Friend


“We were invincible because we were eighteen and stupid.”
― John Grisham, quote from Bleachers


“In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World


“...Please tell me it's not like eighty degrees in Malibu."
"It's not. It's raining, which means the natives are convinced the end is near and are engaged in ritual auto pileups in an attempt to appease the angry gods.”
― D.B. Reynolds, quote from Rajmund


Interesting books

I Am Pilgrim
(82.2K)
I Am Pilgrim
by Terry Hayes
Being Nikki
(27.1K)
Being Nikki
by Meg Cabot
A Crown of Swords
(100.9K)
A Crown of Swords
by Robert Jordan
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
(5.6K)
Seven Pillars of Wis...
by T.E. Lawrence
Bad Moon Rising
(25K)
Bad Moon Rising
by Sherrilyn Kenyon
It Ain't Me, Babe
(25.4K)
It Ain't Me, Babe
by Tillie Cole

About BookQuoters

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.