“...sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Landing
“It was like wanting ice cream instead of meat loaf, and being told that children in refugee camps would be grateful for the meat loaf. Yes, of course she had nothing to complain about, compared to so many people, but when had that ever stopped anyone from complaining? Happiness was a balloon that always hovered just out of arm's reach.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Landing
“Their next reunion shifted like an oasis on the horizon, and Jude couldn't plot her course. She trudged through her days, haunted by the feeling that real life was happening five thousand kilometers away.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Landing
“She was with Jude so rarely that when she was, every cell of her body rang with grateful knowledge of it.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Landing
“The human mind needs boundaries. Without them it would fall in on itself, like a crushed honeycomb.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Landing
Emma Donoghue
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
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“But still, it was not the desire to ‘write’ that was his real motive. To get out of the money-world—that was what he wanted. Vaguely he looked forward to some kind of moneyless, anchorite existence. He had a feeling that if you genuinely despise money you can keep going somehow, like the birds of the air. He forgot that the birds of the air don’t pay room-rent. The poet starving in a garret—but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably—that was his vision of himself.
The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when you owe three weeks’ rent and your landlady is listening for you. Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing. The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on—a ‘competence’, as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.”
― George Orwell, quote from Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“So are you and Marcus finally getting along?" he asked.
"She threatened to castrate me," Marcus said.
I nodded. "Sure did."
Will blinked and stiffened uncomfortably. "Oh."
"That's not nice, Ell," Kate scolded. "Boys need those.”
― Courtney Allison Moulton, quote from Wings of the Wicked
“I will not let them harm you. I will protect you 'till my last breath.”
― Jalpa Williby, quote from Chaysing Dreams
“It is hard to believe that nearly all the vast apparent variety in Nature results from the monotony of repeatedly combining just these three basic actions. But it does. I'll outline a bit of how some of this variety arises.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
“Why don’t they complain?"
"They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
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Bird
The HajBookQuoters 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.
