“Sometimes, before you make any plans or resolutions, before you declare your heroic intent to persevere, you just have to cry.”
― Jaclyn Dolamore, quote from Magic Under Glass
“I furrowed my eyebrows."Are you looking at my bosom, sir?"
The eyes snapped back up. "At such a serious moment? What do you take me for?"
"A rogue, I believe." I tried not to smile.”
― Jaclyn Dolamore, quote from Magic Under Glass
“If one spends too many hours in solitude, one starts to emote for one’s own benefit.”
― Jaclyn Dolamore, quote from Magic Under Glass
“At night I dream of things I scoff at by day.”
― Jaclyn Dolamore, quote from Magic Under Glass
“They were full of mysteries and secrets, like... like poems turned into landscapes."
"'Poems turned into landscapes.'" he murmured with a slight smile. "And what of Vestenveld's gardens? Do you see poems in them?"
"Your gardens are like your country's poetry. Very frilly and organized.”
― Jaclyn Dolamore, quote from Magic Under Glass
“We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was – until my last year at Oundle – anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
“But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?”
― Jack London, quote from John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs
“I’m not like her. I don’t steal people.”
Mr. Tibbalt watched her, saying nothing.
The silence made Victoria bristle. “Well, I don’t.”
― Claire Legrand, quote from The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls
“its muscles white and glistening beneath its creamy hide, its chest broad and heaving, its horn poised and thick.”
― Laura London, quote from The Windflower
“My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
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.
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