Simone Elkeles · 234 pages
Rating: (9.8K votes)
“And my piece of advice is...don't flirt with any of the female instructors. They all have access to weapons bigger than yours.”
“Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.”
“Sometimes we have to prove to others we're strong even where we're not.”
“Believe me, I know people who have doting Grandmas. Jessica's Grandma Pearl spent four years knitting her a blanket. Four years! And she's got arthritis. I wonder what Grandma Pearl would think if she knew Jessica lost her virginity to Michael Greenberg under the blanket she spent four years knitting with her crooked fingers.”
“The threat of taking something away makes us appreciate it more.”
“The end of one thing is just the beginning of another.”
“You can run from some problems, but then you get caught up in others.”
“—Ser judía es más algo de tu corazón que de tu mente. Para algunos, ser judío es seguir estrictamente las leyes y las costumbres de nuestros antepasados. Para otros, es ser parte de una comunidad. La religión es muy personal. Siempre estaré allí para ti si quieres o lo necesitas. Puedes elegir adoptar el judaísmo o decidir que tu vida no lo necesita. Nadie puede imponer la religión en ti o ésta no será real.”
“And,” he continued, “you’re sitting there and you have tears in your eyes and you think about the wonder of this moment, and then—and this is the amazing thing—you look around the auditorium, at the other parents, and you realize that every one of them feels exactly the same away about their own kid. I mean, that’s so obvious and simple and yet something about it overwhelms me. I can’t believe this tremendous feeling, this wave of love, doesn’t belong to us alone, that what we’re experiencing isn’t unique—and that just made it somehow greater. I remember watching the other parents in the audience. You see the wet eyes and the smiles. You see the wives reach for their husband’s hand, no words exchanged. And I remember being just awed. Like, I don’t know, like I couldn’t believe one room, this school auditorium, could be so full of pure love and not just take off from the ground.” Marcia”
“My heart no longer felt as if it belonged to me. It now felt as it had been stolen, torn from my chest by someone who wanted no part of it.”
“I don’t find you ugly, Hunter. No one who knew you could.” Her voice was achingly soft. “If anything, I’m grateful that you have these scars, because they saved you for me— for this moment in time. And that’s a little selfish of me, isn’t it? And yet I can’t help but feel that way.”
“The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”
“I picked up a small square shortbread biscuit and stared at it, noting the uneven angles, wishing it were a perfect square, but it was, after all, merely a baked good, and baked goods did not ordinarily form perfect squares.”
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.