“Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“Fuck you fucks and the fucks you fucked in on!”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“All my stupid little thoughts beget stupid little thoughts, rampantly speculating every possible outcome of every possible situation until they're all done to death and none of them could ever be true.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“I have a lot on my mind and not a lot to do so it's going to come out, all of it, and then, then, it may begin to make a sort of sense”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“And sometimes I try to stop speculating the future out of existence, and other times I just lean back and run with it because maybe it's for the best.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“Maybe it's important to open up I people- people who are right there with you, not some thousand miles away in another universe. Or maybe it's something else. Maybe I should just settle for not knowing. Maybe it's just good to know that you're not the only one who doesn't know.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“I’m just confused. Everything’s confusing. Everything beautiful is far away, or maybe everything far away is beautiful. It’s like how the grass is greener on the other side. Grass just looks nicer from the other side, you know? Grass where you’re standing looks like dirt with hair.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“Maybe all these desperate clashing feelings I'm feeling are just random brain activity, maybe I'm just delusional. But there are things that I miss, and things that I feel like I should be seeing and feeling every time I turn around, and I just keep turning and turning and turning, and there's nothing.”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Lost at Sea
“The influence of the future on the past," said Morel enthusiastically, almost inaudibly.”
― Adolfo Bioy Casares, quote from The Invention of Morel
“There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“Only the strongest are put through the fire,' Josiah said. 'And the forge creates things of great strength and beauty.'
'Then I shall be truly glorious by the time my tenure ends.”
― Sharon Shinn, quote from Archangel
“In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“In the year 1712, a Captain Hussey, cruising in his little boat for right whales along Nantucket’s south shore, was blown out to sea in a fierce northerly gale.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
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.