“Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis”
“I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.”
“The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.”
“… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”
“Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in Heaven, made to kiss God’s ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day.”
“Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him.”
“Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.”
“Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki...”
“Just before nightfall, Hannibal approached Lecter castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; it is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”
“He follows several trains of thought at once, without distraction from any, and one of the trains is always for his own amusement.”
“Hannibal had entered his heart’s long winter. He slept soundly and was not visited in dreams as humans are.”
“When I said that Mercy stood Within the borders of the wood, I meant the lenient beast with claws And bloody swift-dispatching jaws. —LAWRENCE SPINGARN”
“This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing. The”
“Flog no one else with meat.”
“I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook.”
“Not now.It's too late.It was always too late.”
“Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can't be done. You damage them," he said. 'As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won't ever fly the same. It's kinder to let them go.”
“It’s better to be the hero of your own story than to become the villain of someone else’s.”
“Mama always used to say it's better to choke on a bitter truth than savor a honeycake lie.”
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.