John Dufresne · 336 pages
Rating: (586 votes)
“You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see if what you're saying is what you wanted to be saying.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Every person in therapy has a love disorder.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Madeleine has never had a caramel apple and she wants to taste one more than she wants God's love.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, quote from 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas
“It’s the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it’s a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism, laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Stories
“We were all caught in that uncomfortable zone between trying to save our lives and betraying ourselves.”
― Maziar Bahari, quote from Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival
“I love you, Emiline. I loved you before I even knew what it meant.”
― Renee Carlino, quote from Swear on This Life
“It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so I didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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.