“She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends, didn't go out on dates, didn't even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD, and become a scientist.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It’s unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn’t care. That’s intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefine nature. We call it Mother Nature when it’s not a parent in any real sense of the term.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon-- you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“These Americans played with fire. Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people…Americans were demon-raisers. Americans awakened technological demons they couldn’t control, yet they seemed to enjoy the power.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“there was no objective truth, only the truth that’s established by power.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“drinking a Coke and laughing, waving the camera away. “That’s the couple,” Watanabe said. “Grace and Bobby”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“The spider venom was Ebola in thirty seconds.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“field is two million times greater than the strength”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Micro
“This is a miserable world", says the Sergeant. "Human life, Mr. Betteredge, is a sort of target --misfortune is always firing at it, and always hitting the mark".”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from The Moonstone
“Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Book of Lost Things
“I shall remain on Mars and read a book.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The Illustrated Man
“How could they be in the same room and not joke about some smell or make fun of some clueless slouch nearby? How could she ever stand in front of him and not leap at the chance to communicate telepathically?”
― James Dashner, quote from The Kill Order
“Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism in his study of puberty rites in late-twentieth-century Beverly Hills.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from Rendezvous with Rama
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.