“Anything you can imagine is probably true. And the worst you can imagine is probably worth money.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“The years tumble past you like bits of paper on the street and you may not even feel the breeze at your back but then something catches your eye, a twist of black hair or a dog leaping to catch a tennis ball. The splintered chorus of a stupid pop song. You turn around and another chunk of your life drifts by like unrecognized trash and it was never yours to begin with.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“In a city like San Francisco, you can throw a rock out your front door and hit someone with a nice ass and pretty brown eyes. But to find someone you want to fall asleep with, someone you want to breathe and dream next to, is terribly rare.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“Monogamy doesn’t work unless it rises up from the bones. Because it promises nothing but fear and tension when forced on you. It fills you up with despair where there might be joy. It shoves guilt and paranoia and self-loathing down your throat, if you don’t truly want it.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“I thought I loved her. But there was fear between us, truly.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
Will Christopher Baer
Born place: The United States
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“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.
Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.
Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.
How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“Well, clearly not. Goodness boss, just look at those filthy paws. I’ve never seen any fish carry paws like those. Usually they are cleaner.”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“How does this work? Rodents produce pheromonal odors with individual signatures, derived from genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produces unique proteins that form a signature for an individual. This was first studied by immunologists. What does the immune system do? It differentiates between you and invaders—“self” and “nonself”—and attacks the latter. All your cells carry your unique MHC-derived protein, and surveillance immune cells attack any cell lacking this protein password.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“This entire time I've been closing myself off from love., but it's been the solution all along. I've built walls at every turn. No more.”
― Sara Ella, quote from Unblemished
The Divide
A Sister's Promise
Betrayal
Who We Are
Clouds Don't Pass
The Story of San Mic...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.
