“Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.”
“That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation. ”
“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
“The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.”
“The truth of the world is exhausting.”
“There is a world inside the world.”
“A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence.”
“Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. (101)”
“Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.”
“A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.”
“Think of two parallel lines. […] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny. - David Ferrie (339)”
“That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.”
“It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.”
“There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need […] to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions. - Agent Branch (58)”
“[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. (41)”
“If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail. (148)”
“Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.”
“God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.”
“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”
“When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.”
“Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mesh of his composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not being able to record it properly.”
“A word is also a picture of a word.”
“The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.”
“Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.”
“L'azione è verità, e la verità vacilla quando la guerra finisce e gli abitanti del villaggio sono liberi di tornare ai loro campi. Sopravviviamo, e siamo nuovamente sconfitti.”
“Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.”
“Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”
“Tutto dovrebbe essere qualcosa. Ma non lo è mai. È la natura dell'esistenza.”
“The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.”
“Though mountains melt and oceans burn,
The gifts of love shall still return.”
“Do you have something to say?" I prompted. "Or do you just enjoy propping up the wall?"
Colin considered me for a moment longer. Aunt Arabella likes you."
He sounded unflatteringly perplexed.
"There is a small but vocal minority of people who do."
Colin had the good grace to look abashed. "Look, I didn’t mean to—"
"Treat me like I have a loathsome social disease?"
His lips quirked with something that might have been amusement. "Do you?"
"None that I’d admit to in mixed company." After all, an unhealthy obsession with Cadbury Fruit & Nut bars isn’t the sort of weakness a girl confides in just anybody.”
“I know that sounds weird, but it's hard to be scared or even angry at a guy in Spider-Man pajamas,"- Greg”
“But Billy had done good deeds all the time. So had John Wayne Gacy, and dozens of others. It didn’t matter. It was all part of the disguise. Jazz realized that he couldn’t trust even his noblest impulses. They might not be genuine. They might just be camouflage.”
“دائما يستطيع الأطفال أن يعلموا الكبار ثلاثة أشياء:
السعادة بلا سبب ، الانشغال بشيء ما ، ومعرفة كيف يطلبون بكل قوة ما يرغبون فيه.”
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.