“And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of all organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“How mighty, how great the One must be, I thought, to send the heavens careening, and yet hear the cry of a single heart.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“The words, when they came to my heart, were so gentle, and familiar -- and so very sad: What is this you have done?”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I was beloved. I had been hoped for. Somehow, I was necessary.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I wanted to be alone with the One. The One who scaled then careened from the heights of the Mount. The One who raised up the man from the mud. The One who fashioned me from a part of the man and knew me more intimately than even the adam.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“You are necessary to that end, and to me...you are all I have of the garden. You are the image of me and of the One. And if you have wronged, then I have surely repaid your wrong twice over.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I have always contended that girls are the sturdier of the genders and wondered in secret if the One that Is might not best be identified with the creativity of the female heart.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“In the beginning there was God...but for me there was Adam.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I slept in the grip of that love, comforted, thinking I should forget my longing within it, knowing that all was somehow well...In the morning when I stirred, I knew...I knew I lay here in my own flesh, but not alone.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“Sometime before sleep it occurred to me that the true nature of being without might mean never knowing what one lacked.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I felt laid bare, a fruit split open to reveal a moldering inside.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I will protect you all the days of my life. You will be the mother of all who live and the giver of life to the seed spoken by the One -- the seed that will strike the offspring of the serpent. The One has said it, Isha...today I name you Havah, because you will live, and all who live will come from you, and you will give birth to hope.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“A mist crept into the valley—how could this be, by the light of the climbing sun? It drifted over the form in the grass, nearly obscuring it, seeming to draw all sound into itself. I thought I might burst from the strain of that silence... until a single sound shattered it:
The gasp of an indrawn breath.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the”
― Scott O'Dell, quote from Island of the Blue Dolphins
“He's an honest politician--he stays bought.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Stranger in a Strange Land
“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls
“You know what's the rage this year? ...Hats.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
“I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers-- booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one-- the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it-- along with first dibs on the new books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, quote from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
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.
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