“When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“Who are you?'
I didn't understand the question.
I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?'
I gave him my name. 'Stopthief.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.'
I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?'
'Inside.'
It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“Some nights, we were a city of two.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“So," he said, "we ourselves will be the candle flames." He put his hands on his chest. "Feel your hearts, how warm they are.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“Happy". I had not heard that word since Mr. Milgrom spoke it at the last Hanukkah. I asked him the question that had been on my mind since then. "Tata, what is happy?"
He looked at me and at the ceiling and back to me.
"Did you ever taste an orange?" he said. ”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“They don't live here. They live in Heaven.'
Where's that?'
I don't know,' I said. 'Enos says it's right here, on this side of the wall, but I never saw an angel over here. Kuba says it's in Russia. Olek says Washington America.'
What's Washington America?'
Enos says it's a place with no wall and no lice and lots of potatoes.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“You are what you are"
"Which is what? I wondered”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“I thought of the stone angel. I pictured the snow falling over it, two classes of snow rising on the top of its wings. So silent, the both of them, the angel and the snow. I pretended I was the stone angel. I close my eyes and pretended as hard as I could, and after a while I was convinced I could feel wings sprouting from my shoulders. I wanted to look, to see my wings, but I was an angel stone, so I could not move.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“I loved his goatee even more than his mustache. It was so soft and white. I wanted to rub my face in it. I wanted to climb inside it and live there and peek out.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“The louder the babies screamed, the brighter the lights.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
“You" - he pointed at me - "are the black pearl.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Milkweed
Jerry Spinelli
Born place: in Norristown, PA, The United States
Born date February 1, 1941
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“For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
“And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Shakespeare: The World as Stage
“And if someone has friends, and he loses everything in spite of that, it's obvious the friends are to blame. For what they did, or for what they didn't do.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Time of Contempt
“Little. Don't ever let someone call your life, your dreams, little. Hear me?”
― Jason Reynolds, quote from Ghost
“Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You
were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to
me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural
references were the sign of a colonized mind.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
Forever Consumed
Mastiff
Dream a Little Dream
Foreplay
The Beautiful Myster...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.
