“It was like this blackness that crept into the corners of my life until everything was grey and dirty. My insides felt burnt out, like if you cut me open, all you would find would be smoke. No heart. No bones. There was nothing left, just the anger. It followed me everywhere. It sat on my bed and watched me sleep and when I had to eat, it looked at me across the table.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you, if you’ve loved someone, loved who they are, then found out they’re not that person after all. It doesn’t just break your heart, does it? It breaks you. Then you’re not who you thought you were, either.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“We all know what we had, don’t we? We just never thought we could lose it.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“All my life, all I'd ever heard was: Emily's so shy, Emily's so quiet, Emily's so clever. Thinking back on it now, I don't know if I was ever any of those things, or if I just became shy and quiet and clever because everyone said I was.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“Why do you hate her, Emily?"
"For reminding me that I did this to myself.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“China shop rules, Juliet: you break it, you pay for it, and you broke me. You got what you deserved.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“Doctor Gilyard was right, Juliet and I do have a lot in common. She lost her mother, I lost my mother. She lost her father, I lost my father. She had to start again, I had to start again. She had to pretend to be someone else, I had to pretend to be someone else. But where she was better for it, I was worse. Where she used what happened to make her stronger, I held on to it. I let it distil into something filthy and black. And I hated her for that.
Hated her.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“That fucking notebook. I’m going to set fire to it.”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“Hast du jemals so jemanden kennengelernt? jemanden,der so gut ist -nicht perfekt ,sondern gut -das man sich daneben wie Abfall fühlt”
― Tanya Byrne, quote from Heart-Shaped Bruise
“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from Outliers: The Story of Success
“Memory is a tenuous thing. . . .
flickering glimpses, blue
and white, like ancient,
decomposing 16mm film.
Happiness escapes
me there, where faces
are vague and yesterday
seems to come tied
up in ribbons of pain.
Happiness? I look for it intead
in today, where memory
is something I can still
touch, still rely on.
I find it in the smiles
of new friends, the hope
blossoming inside.
My happiest memories
have no place in the
past; they are those
I have yet to create.”
― Ellen Hopkins, quote from Impulse
“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“You'd expect her to see reason,' he muttered.
I don't see why. Most of us don't - we see habit. She'll oppose any modification, reasonable or not, that conflicts with her previously trained feelings of what is right and polite - and be quite honestly convinced that she's showing steadfast strength of character. . .”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids
“That was as rough a thing as I ever heard tell of happening to a boy. And I'm mighty proud to learn how my boy stood up to it. You couldn't ask any more of a grown man... It's not a thing you can forget. I don't guess it's a thing you ought to forget. What I mean is, things like that happen. They may seem mighty cruel and unfair, but that's how life is part of the time. But that isn't the only way life is. A part of the time, it's mighty good. And a man can't afford to waste all the good part, worrying about the bad parts. That makes it all bad.”
― Fred Gipson, quote from Old Yeller
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.