“You humans drink our milk and eat the eggs of the chickens and the ducks. Isn't that enough for you? Isn't it enough that we give you our children and what's meant for our children? And if not, when is it enough? All you humans do is take, take, take from the earth and its beautiful creatures, and what do you give back? Nothing. I know humans consider it a grave insult to be called an animal. Well, I would never give a human the fine distinction of being called an animal, because an animal may kill to live but an animal never lives to kill. Humans have to earn the right to be called animals again.”
“Feelings come and go, unless you don't feel them. Then they stay, and hurt, and grow pear-shaped and weird.”
“This is my religion—we’re all animals, perfect animals created in the infinite image and imagination of nature. It’s a life not without pain and competition and suffering, but it can be a life of dignity and mutual respect.”
“Then they just get it with their minds, intellectually, because if they got it with their hearts and souls, they would change, they would change and rejoin the animal kingdom and once again be proud to be called animals.”
“It's hard to leave anywhere. Even if the place sucked. It's hard to leave anywhere at all.”
“You can't just wear the food chain around your neck like a bauble or necklace. You're part of it and if you keep treating it with disdain, that chain will strangle you.”
“Dogs are the broccaflower of the animal kingdom.”
“Hate is like a poison you make for your enemy that you end up swallowing yourself.”
“Humans have to earn the right to be called animals again.”
“I’ve never seen a wild almond or a soy galloping about in its natural habitat, but cow milk is the best.”
“There is something in man that loves a wall, but what wall menders and fence builders do not get is that when they fence something out, they are also fencing themselves in. Not one but two prisons are made by one wall.”
“You think plants don’t have feelings? Maybe not the type of feelings you and I have, but they do have planty feelings, really slow feelings that unfold or blossom over years rather than seconds.”
“What a strange god that instead of bringing people together, divides them.”
“I was confused at how people could mistreat and eat us on the one hand and then celebrate us on the other for qualities they admired. It was then I realized that humans were very complicated and confused and I could spend the rest of my life puzzling them out. I decided I didn’t have time to do that.”
“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —CHARLES DARWIN”
“I told you already that Mother Earth is our god, and the only thing that offends our god is waste and pollution, not words and pictures and jokes. I have nothing but sympathy for reverence of God in the abstract. Love of God and life is as natural as the force that holds the planets in their dance.”
“You want some of this?” The dog now angled his backside close to Shalom’s nose. This was not going to end well. “Can you tell they feed me steak? Go on, have a whiff. I would share with you, meine kleine bitch.”
“What a strange god that instead of bringing people together, divides them. So”
“You, me, the animals in the wild, the animal at your feet, the animal on your plate, the person next to you— We are all one We are all holy cows Moo”
“Maybe you should go back down to the house.' I said, 'I'm never going down there again, I hate people.' And she said, 'Don't hate. Hate is like a poison you make for your enemy that you end up swallowing yourself.' And I said, 'Nice one, Obovine-Wan Kenobi.”
“in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —CHARLES DARWIN”
“Not one but two prisons are made by one wall.”
“Digression and digestion. It’s what we do.”
“Of course I’m biased, what else could I be? Bias makes the world go round, sometimes a little too fast.”
“Haat is een vergif dat je bereidt voor je vijand, maar uiteindelijk zelf inslikt”
“And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
“We had learned that nothing lasts and that no value is absolute. The only exception to that rule: freedom.”
“Bleary-eyed one morning, with caffeine still missing from my system, I fumbled my way along the dusty path to the guest tents, calling out ‘Good morning!’ in as cheery a voice as the hour would allow (it was barely after five o’clock, and the sun had only just cracked the horizon). I heard a rhythmic thumping, getting rapidly louder, and I turned to find 1,600 pounds of pissed-off cow bearing down on me. Clearly it disagreed with my assessment of the morning.”
“...they were exactly what the other needed; the missing piece that made everything else magically click into place.”
“My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with secondhand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don't; it's a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unaffected.
True, they're not for the faint of heart. Wild and chaotic, capricious and frustrating, there are certain physical laws that govern secondhand bookstores and like gravity, they're pretty much nonnegotiable. Paperback editions of D. H. Lawrence must constitute no less than 55 percent of all stock in any shop. Natural law also dictates that the remaining 45 percent consist of at least two shelves worth of literary criticism on Paradise Lost and there should always be an entire room in the basement devoted to military history which, by sheer coincidence, will be haunted by a man in his seventies. (Personal studies prove it's the same man. No matter how quickly you move from one bookshop to the next, he's always there. He's forgotten something about the war that no book can contain, but like a figure in Greek mythology, is doomed to spend his days wandering from basement room to basement room, searching through memoirs of the best/worst days of his life.)
Modern booksellers can't really compare with these eccentric charms. They keep regular hours, have central heating, and are staffed by freshly scrubbed young people in black T-shirts. They're devoid of both basement rooms and fallen Greek heroes in smelly tweeds. You'll find no dogs or cats curled up next to ancient space heathers like familiars nor the intoxicating smell of mold and mildew that could emanate equally from the unevenly stacked volumes or from the owner himself. People visit Waterstone's and leave. But secondhand bookshops have pilgrims. The words out of print are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink.”
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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