“After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“If you were to rush into this room right now and announce that you had struck a deal - with God, Allah, Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Bill Gates, whomever - in which the ten years since my diagnosis could be magically taken away, traded in for ten more years as the person I was before - I would, without a moment's hesitation, tell you to take a hike.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day - it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“It is one of the great ironies of my life that only when it became virtually impossible for me to keep my body from moving would I find the peace, security, and spiritual strength to stand in one place. I couldn't be still until I could—literally—no longer keep still.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“It seems to me that the quality of a moment in time is not always a reflection of the moment in and of itself—what happens before and what happens after are often what give it its savor.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“This is why the license plates say Beautiful British Columbia, and I realized just how much I would miss it. But all this natural beauty exists only in response to rain, I reminded myself, and the occasional day of technicolor spectacle was bought and paid for with weeks and weeks of dull, damp gray. I wasn't going to miss the gray. If”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“was an antidote to the self-consciousness that consumed me as an eccentric teenager in search of an identity.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“I began to long for the benign indifference of Robert Redford flossing his molars.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“This is what my lifelong search for room to maneuver had come to: a box of water in a lightless, windowless nine-by-sixteen-foot room—afraid to leave my artificial womb, to go outside where I could only cause trouble, disappoint my family and myself. Best, I thought, to stay right here where I couldn't fuck anything up. And stay I would, day after day, sometimes three or four times on weekends, for hours at a time, just trying to keep my head below water. Connecticut—Christmas”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“I have referred to it as a gift--something for which others with this affliction have taken me to task. I was only speaking from my own experience, of course, but I stand partially corrected: if it is a gift, it's the gift that just keeps on taking.
Coping with relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy. Nobody would ever choose to have this visited upon them. Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality--or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was--courage? acceptance? wisdom?--that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift--and absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched. That's why I consider myself a lucky man.”
― Michael J. Fox, quote from Lucky Man
“I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn’t about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.’ It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“Nathan poured himself a black coffee and replaced the jug in the”
― Jojo Moyes, quote from Still Me
“Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It’s just something you do sometimes.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.”
― Nora Ephron, quote from I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
“Don't moralize at me! I have no love
For images, old gods, prophetic words.
I want to talk to Utnapishtim!
Tell me how.”
― quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh
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.