“Every time I question him about the feasibility, he smiles at me like he's Yoda and I'm just a dumbass without the Force.”
“She crossed over death to call me. I crossed through Hell to find her.”
“What?" she asks, but I don't answer. Instead I kiss her, one time, and try to tell her in that single gesture everything that she'll forget as soon as she turns away. I tell her I love her. I tell her I'll miss her. And then I let her go.”
“Jesus. I have become the thing they call the third wheel.”
“I don't care what your name is," she hisses. "And I don't care who you are. If you don't get him some help, I will burn your fucking place down." Go Carmel.”
“I love her.”
“She’s dead.”
“That doesn’t mean to me what it does to other people.”
“All this faux flattery. It's not enough to make me forget he's a dick. Admittedly, though, he's sort of a charismatic dick.”
“Chef?" Carmel exclaims. "I could give a shit about a chef. I'm going to find the most expensive thing in that kitchen, eat one bite, and throw the rest on the floor. Then I'm going to break some plates.”
“Damsels? You get sliced open, burned, and dashed against rocks about a thousand times or so. Then we'll see who the damsel is.”
“He almost killed my friends. Fuck that guy.”
“She glares at me resentfully, like I'm being unfair. But she's probably going to try to kill me, and kill me righteously, so eff you very much.”
“Cassio,” she whispers. “Get me out of here.”
“Jestine and I lock eyes. She's going to look away first. Even if my eyeballs have to completely dry out.”
“In the sixth row of the theater, in the third chair in, Anna winks at me. Or maybe she just blinks. I can't tell. She's missing half of her face.”
“It’s true what they say about answers only leading to more questions. There will always be more to find out, more to learn, more to do.”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t always have to be spirits and magic. Sometimes hauntings are in your mind. It doesn’t make them less real.”
“You'd better eat that," she says.
"I'm taking it easy on my stomach," I protest. "Come on. It just had a knife in it.”
“But the mall is a thing that should not be suffered. Except maybe for Cinnabon.”
“Guys," he says. "After this is over, can we go get a burger or something?"
"You're thinking about food now?" Carmel asks.
"Hey, you haven't spent the last three days fasting and doing herbal rue steams and drinking nothing but Morfran's gross chrysanthemum purification potions." Carmel and I grin at each other in the mirror. "It isn't easy becoming a vessel. I'm freaking starving.”
“Everyone seems to know more than I do, and being on the shallow end of the information pool is starting to piss me off.”
“Don't profane yourself, or the Biodag Dubh."
Oh, Mary Ann. Me and the Beedak Doo are just fine.”
“Without a word, we start to walk together down the long hall. I'm so pent up and irritated with this place; I want to kick down the closed doors and break up a prayer circle, maybe juggle the athame with a couple of candles just to see the horrified looks on their faces and hear their screams of "Sacrilege!”
“She's liked you since chemistry last semester," Carmel says, scowling.
"Then you should have told her what an ass I am. Made me sound like a moronic jerk."
"Better to let her see it for herself.”
“I want to cross my arms and say things like, "Don't come back if you're not going to stay!" and "If you think that nothing's changed, you're wrong." But she probably heard all this stuff from Thomas already. I wasn't the boyfriend. I don't know why I feel like I should get the chance to yell at her too.
Jesus. I have become the thing they call the third wheel.”
“Your morality isn't the only morality in the world. Just because it's yours doesn't mean it's right.”
“Can you fight?"
Jestine nods in my direction. "I can take Cas on pretty easily."
"Is that supposed to impress me?”
“His skin is black as a struck match, cracked and oozing liquid metal heat, like he's covered by a cooling layer of lava. The eyes stand out bright white. I can't make out from this distance if they have corneas. God I hope they have corneas. I hate that creepy weird-eye shit.”
“This is weird. There's a dead woman in front of me like dozens of other dead women I've seen. But this one is a queen, and a famous one. If it's possible to be starstruck by the dead, then I guess that's what's happening.”
“She raises her brows at Thomas and Carmel.
"How do you want to room? The two of you and the two of us? Or boys in one, girls in the other?"
"Boys in one," I say quickly.
"Right. Back in a minute." Jestine gets up to make the arrangements, leaving me with my gaping friends.
"Where'd that come from?" Carmel asks.
"Where'd what come from?"
As usual, playing dumb gets me nowhere.”
“I’ll be here if he needs me. I’ll watch his back.”
Carmel smiles. “Better watch all sides. He can be downright clumsy sometimes.”
“He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.”
“But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.”
“Love is a power which produces love.”
“I just sat there, staring out towards the darkness of the ocean and the starlight flashing off the crests of the waves and knew that we were all part of this bigger whole. That somehow I mattered in the course of things and a part of me would always have left its mark on this world.”
“ALONE
One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard.
I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.
After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.”
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.