“To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless. After”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved
“The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.”
― Deborah Levy, quote from Swimming Home
“Picking locks was not a skill he had ever cultivated, but he persisted day after day, turning the tip of his talon into different ways of approaching a keyhole. He never tired, and he ever gave up...because if there was any justice in the universe, he wouldn't be trapped here forever.”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from Everfound
“Genius in the popular sense has become common. (...) Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered - delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.”
― Knut Hamsun, quote from Mysteries
“He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides. It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sound of Waves
“According to a local news team investigation, response times to emergency calls from Grady averaged around forty-five minutes. An ambulance took even longer.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
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.