“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“He was born a politician.
No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education…”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Become such as you are, having learned what that is.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Why is everything an 'adventure' with you?" Sylvie said irritably to Izzie."
"Because life is an adventure, of course."
"I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.”
“And if we are killed?”
“Then others must remember us.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Klara said. “If we all had it there would be no history to write about.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win is for enough good women to do nothing.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“...but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Scars heal,” Sylvie said. “Even the worst ones.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“Kittens were in continual abundance on the farm, there was a kind of kitten currency in the neighborhood, they were bartered for all kinds of emotional regret or fulfillment by parents - a doll lost, an exam passed.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“How quickly life could dissolve into its more ugly elements.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“When he said this, it was not a form of criticism. It was just a simple observation that led to another bite from the movie on his plate called The Old Man and the Stew.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away
“love was an emotion that existed beyond the confines of the human condition. It could rise to the highest peaks, he said. Even out there in the heavens, love flew, soared, and spread between the stars. I”
― Rebecca Maizel, quote from Stolen Nights
“Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“If you call the day after, you’re maybe a bit desperate because, since the first day is out of the question, the second day is really the first day, so you’re calling on the first day. If they’re going to call, people call on the third day.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“How many people live in the moment? A few? How many people live for tomorrow at the sacrifice of today?" Dreyfus opened his fist to reveal it to be empty. "...When tomorrow is never a guarantee.”
― Richard Doetsch, quote from The 13th Hour
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.