“I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“I hope this letter reaches you (Osama) anyway. I hope it finds you before the Americans do otherwise I'm going to wish I hadn't bothered aren't I?”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“Come to Me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“It was not warm and not cold. There was no wind and the sky was very low and grey but it wasn't raining. It was like they'd completely run out of weather.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“London is a city built on the wreckage of itself Osama. It's had more comebacks that The Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners jut took a deep breath and put the kettle on. Then the whole thing burned down. Every last stick of it. ... People thought it was the end of the world. BUt the Londoners got up the next day and the world hadn't ended so they rebuilt the city in 3 years stronger and taller.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn't got much in the way of family? Well here's the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I've lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“That is the nature of this madness. It fills the sky with barrage balloons and people's eyes with hate.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves.”
― quote from Numbers
“Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over - years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.”
― L.M. Montgomery, quote from Rilla of Ingleside
“Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, quote from Ceremony
“The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We've all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was the have a 'revolutionary man' followed by the 'new man.' Trouble is, they never found the 'new man.' They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn't mean the peasants were suddenly free--they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you've got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus' mission.”
― Lee Strobel, quote from The Case for Christ
“I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, quote from The Moon and Sixpence
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.