Quotes from In the After

“This is how I think of time: the past is Before, and the present is the After. Before was reality; the After, a nightmare.”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“All of Them are monsters, but not all monsters are Them.”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“I’d always escaped into books, but now reading had become something more. It allowed me to be somewhere else, to feel something else, not just the numbness that overtook my body and made me wonder if I was still alive.”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“Gareth once told me that ignorance was bliss and I’d responded that ignorance was dangerous. We were both right. But which is better?”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“You don't mind giving up your freedom?"
Vivian tilted her head. "You always have to give up some freedom to live in any society.”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“Doesn’t he know there will always be someone out there who wants to destroy good?”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“People don’t expect a small Japanese girl to be able to break a man’s arm.
“They didn’t assume you were a ninja?”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“Everyone works because everyone is important.” To me this sounded like a great way to spin forced labor.”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“People don’t expect a small Japanese girl to be able to break a man’s arm. “They didn’t assume you were a ninja?”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

“You were in the city," Rice explained, "High concentraition of Floraes, hardly any post-aps. In other areas, where there was less population density, children were the ones more likely to survive. Adults probably kept them concealed, took extra measures to protect them. And of course children are good at hiding. Once their instinctual survival skills kick in, they know how to be quiet."
"They believed in monsters before the monsters showed up," I wispered.”
― Demitria Lunetta, quote from In the After

About the author

Popular quotes

“You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I'm doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh

“Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross

“هذه المرأة لم تشبع في قرارة نفسي شهوة الجسد التي تعتري الرحالة بل لطَّفت محنتي الأولى. فقد ولدت غريباً، وعشت غريباً، وسوف أموت وقد تعاظمت غربتي. وغروري يمنعني من ذكر العداء، والإهانات، والضغينة، والمعاناة. ولكن النظرات والحركات لا تخفي عليَّ. فعناق بعض النساء يلوح كالمنفى، وعناق بعضهن الآخر يذكر بالأرض الأم”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

“I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.