Quotes from Johnno

“Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.”
― David Malouf, quote from Johnno

“Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.”
― David Malouf, quote from Johnno

“I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”
― David Malouf, quote from Johnno

“The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.”
― David Malouf, quote from Johnno

“Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.”
― David Malouf, quote from Johnno

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Popular quotes

“Which is just grief, I guess. I've decided that grief is like a newborn baby. It knocks you for six. It takes over your brain with its incessant cry. It stops you sleeping or eating or functioning, and everyone says, "Hang in there, it gets easier." What they don't say is, "Two years on, you'll think it's got easier, but then, out of the blue, you'll hear a certain tune in the supermarket and start sobbing.”
― Sophie Kinsella, quote from Surprise Me

“Neat' was the highest superlative possible from Burndee and it was not a word that he often used...unless he was describing something he had done. 'Neat'--without even 'very' or 'really' attached to it--was extremely high praise from Burndee.”
― Allison Tebo, quote from The Reluctant Godfather

“we are not the only ones who knew a Stone Age: our closest relatives still live in one. To stress this point, a “percussive stone technology” site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.31 These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Marcus Aurelius. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Great Reckoning

“shoeburyness n. The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from someone else's bottom.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

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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.