“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.
All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn't make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn't make sense either.
Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don't know enough to know why.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“He did not want to see the war movie. It would be full of shit.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Remove,’ I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe it. Hebdemanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn't, life was garbage. He hd to rulenout the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddamn much to stand for. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Tal vez sea la propia simplicidad del asunto lo que nos conduce al error.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Black Cat
“The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can’t fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly. Only a monster would lock a bird in here and call himself an animal lover.”
― Caroline Kepnes, quote from You
“The future?' came the voice sadly...'And do we really pass anything on to the future, except mirrors of ourselves? What if the future is as painful as the past?'
'That we can never know,'answered the wolf angrily. 'That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe the present. Here and now...What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.”
― David Clement-Davies, quote from Fell
“How could they think Noel was hot? If this was REALLY Versailles, Noel SO would not be Louis XIV, he would be the French version of the village idiot”
― Sara Shepard, quote from Killer
“Μια μέρα ο Μπερντ, ήταν έξι χρόνων, είχε κάνει μια ερώτηση στον πατέρα του: "Πού βρισκόμουν, πατέρα, εκατό χρόνια πριν γεννηθώ; Πού θα βρίσκομαι εκατό χρόνια μετά το θάνατό μου; Τι θα απογίνω, πατέρα, όταν πεθάνω;" Χωρίς να του πει λέξη, ο νεαρός πατέρας του είχε δώσει μια γροθιά στο στόμα, του έσπασε δύο δόντια, το πρόσωπό του πλημμύρισε στο αίμα κι ο Μπερντ ξέχασε το φόβο του θανάτου. Τρεις μήνες αργότερα ο πατέρας του είχε φυτέψει μια σφαίρα στο κεφάλι του.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, quote from A Personal Matter
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.