“There will always be dark characters, but her life is good; it is as she wishes it to be.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“That which begins will also end.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“He sits at the filthy bar and silently witnesses the change of watch from his will to his independently operating motor skills.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“If he drinks one hundred dollars a day--and he can--he's got one hundred days to drink. It's just an arithmetic operation, simple logic.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“Purity of execution will only add to the artistic aspects of the whole wretched mess.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“His point was made, and he moved along, in keeping with the tangential nature that must consume at least one of them. There is a bottle in his future--perhaps sooner a glass--elsewhere on the line.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“He knew that being handy is the kind of conspicuous skill that makes it easier for others to tolerate you. They tolerated, and even liked him, for as long as they could.”
― John O'Brien, quote from Leaving Las Vegas
“to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“O may it come, the time of love,
The time we'd be enamoured of.
- Song of the Highest Tower”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Against the Day
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.