“For me love is like this: you're in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You're happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it's breathtaking, a surprise, something you've done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you're delighted again.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“In love and mating, ambience is central.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“This shooting star had apparently been sedentarized in my bailiwick-so, good.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“What a datum! I couldn't help thinking over and over.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“This might be good, I thought as I studied the crowd. There were several definitely intelligent guys present, not strobe-light intellects but people who could make you uncomfortable in a debate if you got too much beyond what you absolutely had the facts on.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“A utopia I would join in a minute is a society which could be communist or capitalist, anything, except that no woman member of it ever underwent sex unless she was hot. Pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it’s a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“he saw that at its center were Coretta and Yoki, unharmed. And then, having made sure of that, Martin Luther King became very calm, with what Branch calls “the remote calm of a commander.” Stepping back out on the porch, he held up his hand for silence. Everything was all right, he told the crowd. “Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky. Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.” The crowd was silent now, as King continued speaking. He himself might die, he said, but that wouldn’t matter. “If I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just.”
― Robert A. Caro, quote from Master of the Senate
“The Gauls’ own ships were built and rigged in a different manner from ours. They were made with much flatter bottoms, to help them to ride shallow water caused by shoals or ebb-tides. Exceptionally high bows and sterns fitted them for use in heavy seas and violent gales, and the hulls were made entirely of oak, to enable them to stand any amount of shocks and rough usage. The cross-timbers, which consisted of beams a foot wide, were fastened with iron bolts as thick as a man’s thumb. The anchors were secured with iron chains instead of ropes. They used sails made of raw hides or thin leather, either because they had no flax and were ignorant of its use, or more probably because they thought that ordinary sails would not stand the violent storms and squalls of the Atlantic and were not suitable for such heavy vessels. In meeting them the only advantage our ships possessed was that they were faster and could be propelled by oars; in other respects the enemy’s were much better adapted for sailing such treacherous and stormy waters. We could not injure them by ramming because they were so solidly built, and their height made it difficult to reach them with missiles or board them with grappling-irons. Moreover, when it began to blow hard and they were running before the wind, they weathered the storm more easily; they could bring in to shallow water with greater safety, and when left aground by the tide had nothing to fear from reefs or pointed rocks – whereas to our ships all these risks were formidable.”
― Gaius Julius Caesar, quote from The Conquest of Gaul
“Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Jesus I Never Knew
“If you so much as snicker, I will kill you all.”
― Robin LaFevers, quote from Mortal Heart
“Zouelle had forgotten how tiring it was listening to a Neverfell at full pace, like being bludgeoned with exclamation marks.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Face Like Glass
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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