“Low branches, dead and snapping against us. On the lookout for rattlesnakes. But the path was short enough, and soon we were on a kind of terrace. Old lawn overgrown by grass and weed, old concrete cracked in discrete chunks, vast areas overrun. An enchanted place for me, and only for me, because I was too young to remember, and so in my mind this place could become more.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“That night longer than all my life before it. No scale or measure in this world can ever be held constant. We are always slipping.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“We're not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“WE THINK OF CAIN AS THE ONE WHO KILLED HIS BROTHER, but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“Yalnızca biz değil, bizden önceki herkes için de olduğu gibi, ıstırap çekmenin ve insan ömrünün bir simgesi olarak kendi haçını taşıyan İsa için de olduğu gibi, hayat tekrardan ibarettir. Tüm hikâyelerimizde bizler şu yeryüzünde bir ağırlığı sürükleyip taşırız. Buna Çile denir. İsa, kendimize acımamızın hikâyesidir.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“I mean, who does that? Who touches someone’s hair and pronounces they have magic?”
“Darth Sullivan.”
“Darth goddamned Sullivan.”
― Chloe Neill, quote from Hard Bitten
“In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, quote from The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
“It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.”
― Per Petterson, quote from Out Stealing Horses
“Er war entsetzt … und der Höhlenmensch in ihm sprang herum und freute sich.”
― Stephen King, quote from Firestarter
“I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Welcome to the Monkey House
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.