“Love. The opposite of fear is love, and every minute of every day, we choose between the two.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I sat there looking normal but thinking about how much I wished we were going to see the real Jesus. Everyone needed a miracle once in a while.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“Sometimes things get broken and people make mistakes. It's just what happens. And then, if you're lucky, they get fixed again, before it's too late.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I stared at the phone and swallowed the piece of my heart that was lodged in my throat now.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“At the door, I looked back at all those people I didn’t know and thought about how small your heart is but how big of a space it takes up. And how, even though you can’t see it, that heart space grows so quietly across a room or up some stairs into someone else’s living room, that even if you never step foot in it again, the air in there is changed forever.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“Mary made him lie down in the middle of the stage. Then she started singing, “Everything’s all right, yes, everything’s fine …” and rubbing something on his forehead, which wasn’t going to help him. No one ever gets saved by a forehead rub. Ask Laura Ingalls Wilder if you don’t believe me. But Mary kept doing it anyway, begging him to let the world turn without him tonight because everything was all right—which it wasn’t, because even his best friend, Judas, was acting weird.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“But the truth was that Laura Ingalls Wilder was the nicest girl I’d ever not known. Rennie would throw me under a bus for a piece of chocolate.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“And suddenly it smelled like someone forgot to turn on the gravity. The air was so fresh and light you could practically float on it. Flowers were everywhere, all of them bursting with color.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“What Love Means to Me,” Chad said, writing. “By Apron Bramhall, the loveliest noun I know. Get over here, noun.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“Draco dormiens nunquam titillandu.
A sleeping dragon is never to be tickled.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I folded up that last bit of hope and put it away on the top shelf of my life.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I’m an oncologist, not a podiatrist.” My skin unzipped. Those were the worst kinds of doctors. They never saved anyone.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I wrote Vis consilii epers mole ruit sua on the front of the first tag, and on the inside I put the translation: Force lacking judgment collapses under its own weight. And in case they still didn’t get it, I wrote Sorry! I’m just a big dummy.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“The lady shuffled around, bending over to inspect the flowers and holding up one of the tags. “Oh nuts. Are these already sold?” she asked. I shook my head. “No.”
“Goody,” she smiled, looking at a tag that said Adulescenita Deferbui, on the outside and The Fires of Youth have Cooled – But you’re still looking foxy!”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I watched her shuffle around, reading tags and smelling flowers, laughing every time or smiling nice—what flowers were supposed to make you do.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“But what are you supposed to do now? I mean, how are you supposed to act normal?”
Mike looked at me, his blueberry eyes searching. “I don’t know, Apron,” he said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
And then, just like that, I understood what my real job was this summer, and it had nothing to do with flowers.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A picture of my mom,” I said, opening his ice-cold hand and putting the frame in it gently.
“But Apron,” Chad said. “I can’t see.”
“I know. But it’s not for now. It’s for when you get there, so you can find her.”
Chad tapped his finger on my mom’s cheek. “Does she look like you?”
I thought about it hard enough for Chad to take in another long breath. “A little bit,” I said.
“Not quite as pretty?”
“Well,” I said. “You’ll have to see for yourself.”
Chad raised his eyebrows. “I’ll find her, Apron. I promise. If you promise me something, too.”
I nodded, but then remembered he couldn’t see me. “What?”
“Don’t stay sad. Remember our poem. What it means. Promise?”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I walked around the counter and straight into his white T-shirt. Then we stood like that, him holding my red head, and me listening to the part of his chest where his heart used to be.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I missed Chad in the same way that I missed my mom now: always.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“High tide spilled over my lashes.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“We turned away from each other at the same time, the space between us getting longer, until it looked like we hadn’t even been standing together in the first place. But we had, and it was there: another heart layer on top of that sidewalk, changing it forever.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“Inside, the air smelled so fragile you could break it with a sneeze.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“Already in love with her, huh?” she said. I jerked my eyes away and thought about it. But there it was, that tiny heart space, already spreading out between us, my sister and me.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“The church smelled like leftover tears. Sadness was tucked into corners and hidden under beams and pasted so thick on the walls that it was hard to breathe.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“And even though I had freckles and red hair and almost killed Grandma Bramhall, I danced like I didn’t.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I hadn’t actually come out and asked him to pick us up, so when he said, “All right, give me twenty minutes, I gotta go dig out my old crutches,” I knew with every last drop of blood and every bone in my body that Mike was at least related to Jesus.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I didn’t want them to be gay anymore. I didn’t want people like Mrs. Perry to make a face and step away from them; I didn’t want Mike to shuffle his feet and clear frogs out of his throat whenever he talked to my dad; and I didn’t want Chad to go around making fun of himself so nobody else could. And most of all, I didn’t want them to have AIDS.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“Listen, little lady, the people who do this kind of thing think if we rub up against them, they’ll catch it. But there ain’t no catching what we got,” he smirked. It was the same thing Mike had said. “Either you is or you isn’t. And if you’re lucky, you isn’t.” Toby’s extra-brown eyes softened. “Life’s hard enough.”
He looked at me while I thought about this: Being gay wasn’t any different than having freckles.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
“I stayed there sipping in that wrong air, until it filled my lungs with knowing that something bad was about to happen.”
― Jennifer Gooch Hummer, quote from Girl Unmoored
Jennifer Gooch Hummer
Born place: Boston, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Enchantress of Florence
“Scents, patterns of light and shade, winds and hurricanes — all pulsed inwardly through my own sinews and veins: so much so, indeed, that the throb of my blood stream, the swarming growth of my cells, the whole mystery of life housed within me seemed to be echoed by the shrilling cicadas, the gusts of wind that shook the trees, and the faint crunch of the moss as I trod it underfoot.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from Prime of Life (1929-1944)
“I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Thornyhold
“Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that can not fly.
Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems
“She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she'd been born with it or baptized it, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of 'beauty' and 'twilight' and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from The Stories of Eva Luna
The Demigod Diaries
The Concrete Blonde
Caressed by Ice
Find You in the Dark
Kitchen
MatterhornBookQuoters 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.
