Quotes from Journey by Moonlight

“In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen...”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“Everyone has to find his own way to die.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you're just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That's why the church won't allow eunuchs to become priests.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“I really dislike the sort of people who aren't like other people. It's true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren't like them.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

“as long as we keep moving, we don’t notice how tired we are, but only when we sit down.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight

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Popular quotes

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“The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey’s course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf.”
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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.