“Never tie your happiness to the tail of someone else's kite.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“Sometimes it's not what we hold on to that shapes our lives--it's what we're willing to let go of.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“Maybe that's what love does - smooths the hard edges of life, giving us a gentle place to land when we fall.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“I thought about that old saying, how we can never go home again. But I think it's more like a piece of us stays behind when we leave -- a piece we can never reclaim, one that awaits our next visit and demands that we remember.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“You can't see the whole sky from one window.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“But even so, I wondered--how well do we really ever know someone?”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“You're wrong, Mama. The world's beautiful, but you're so busy being disappointed in everything you don't see it!!”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“But I hurt everywhere, Mama. How do I make it stop?" She looked at me with a sad smile. "I don't know. Only you can figure that out. But try to remember something, Teddi: Never tie you happiness to the tail of someone else's kite.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“I knew the flight into the crazy skies of love would always outweigh the uncertainty of days that didn't yet belong to me.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“Never tie your happiness to the end of someone else's kite.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
“In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
“His gaze turned cold as he faced her. ‘Sure, she’s attractive. A stone wall would be attractive if it looked like that. It’s her attitude I don’t like. There’s more to love than just getting your itches scratched.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Mirror of Her Dreams
“What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
“It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love
“The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales
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.