“The best friendships are like mobile phones, I think--you can't explain exactly how they work, but you're just relieved they do.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“There's a difference between compromising your independence and compromising yourself. Love's about giving up a little dependence, darling. But that doesn't mean you have to stop being you.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“Stress can make people say things they don't mean, though. That's why you have to relax.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“Outside, I avoided the gazes of passersby and slid gratefully into the cavernous interior of Godric's car. I didn't like to say "This is yours?" because wherever I placed the stress in that sentence, it sounded faintly insulting. It felt as if I were sitting inside a very pricey black leather handbag. Things glittered at me, and the bits that weren't leather or glittering were sort of dull black. It all smelled wildly expensive.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“Back in the kitchen, Mummy was trying to make her [knitted] hippo stand up on the table. I had to swallow a gasp of horror -- its head was the same size as its body, none of its limbs were equal in length, and it appeared to have a fin. She didn't seem perturbed and carried on trying to make it stand with a childlike patience.
Because of its grotesquely misshapen head, it looked as if it was trying to do some kind of yoga headstand.
"That hippo's got five legs," observed Allegra from the window seat. "Unless you've made it very anatomically correct? In which case it's positively disturbing.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“[The photos] all bore the hallmarks of very expensive lighting and artistry, but Godric was projecting variations on the same emotion in every single one of them. Acute awkwardness.
Admittedly he'd really gotten "awkward" nailed--even in black Armani, leaning against a glass wall, he looked like a teenager waiting outside an STD clinic.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“My mind seemed to think in terms of very bad song lyrics these days.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“I want to share all of my New York with you, Melissa. My house, my friends, my life. It's not just about where you live, what you have. It's about who you are with. I know you get that, and I can't tell what it means to me.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“I only had to breathe near cheesecake and I put on about five pounds. I had that sort of figure. Gabi called it voluptuous, but Marks & Spencer's called it size 12.”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" were three entirely separate levels of information”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
“Never actually having owned a dog myself, I wasn't sure what the correct procedure was. Did I offer to pay for the morning-after pill, or something? Should I insist that Braveheart marry her?”
― Hester Browne, quote from Little Lady, Big Apple
Hester Browne
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from The Names
“See," he said, "the arrow struck against this. It is the kiss I gave her. It has saved her life.”
― J.M. Barrie, quote from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens / Peter and Wendy
“The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the most certain it is that I only assert a limitation.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Book of Lies
“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?”
― Ann Patchett, quote from Truth and Beauty
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Whistling Past the G...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.
