“you were both hunter and hunted; the shadow of your thoughts was the beast which killed you.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“All things are known, Tallis, but most things are forgotten.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“if you don't first accept the gift as it is—if you change what you hear, or change what you learn—doesn't that make it weak somehow?" "Why should it?" Mr. Williams asked softly. "As I believe I've said to you before, the gift is not what you hear, or learn… the gift is being able to hear and learn. These things are yours from the moment they come and you can shape the tune, or the clay, or the painting, or whatever it is, because it belongs to you. It's what I've always done with my music.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“I really didn't mean to steal it." Mr. Williams shook his head. He scratched at his chin nervously. "Why not? That's what they're there for. Tunes belong to everybody. So do stories.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“So are you telling me…" he composed his thoughts. "Are you telling me that if you told the last story again, and changed the young woman to a young man, then somewhere in history that same young woman would suddenly grow a beard?" Tallis laughed at the image. "I don't know," she said. "I suppose so.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“But stories are fragile. Like people's lives. It only takes a word out of place to change them forever. If you hear a lovely tune, and then you change it, the new tune might be lovely too, but you've lost the first one." "But if I stick to the first tune, then I've lost the second." "But someone else might discover it. It's still there to be born." "And the first tune isn't?" "No," Tallis insisted, although she was confused now. "It has already come into your mind. It's lost forever." "Nothing is lost forever," Mr. Williams said quietly. "Everything I've known I still know, only sometimes I don't know that I know it." All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them. "My grandfather said something like that to me," Tallis whispered. "Well there you are. Wise Old Men, one and all…”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“Have I told you about Christ?" "Ghost-born-man-walking-on-water-telling-stories-dead-on-tree.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“A hundred years ago they'd have burned you as a witch…" "But I'm not a witch." "I don't suppose any of them were.”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“Minden mese és dallam varázslatból születik”
― Robert Holdstock, quote from Lavondyss
“When someone leaves, it's because someone else is about to arrive.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from The Zahir
“For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from Three Comrades
“What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Right Stuff
“Better to join a ghost than to be haunted by them. Better no life than an empty one-”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
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.