“As we used to say in the mountains, "Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath, you are alive." After all these years, this still the best advice I can give you: Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child. The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can't understand His will; He can't be explained in a book. He didn't abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change. He simply is. I don't pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don't need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“We all have our personal Andes.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“So I would teach myself to live in constant uncertainty, moment by moment, step by step. I would live as if I were dead already. With nothing to lose, nothing could surprise me, nothing could stop me from fighting; my fears would not block me from following my instincts, and no risk would be too great.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“My duty is to fill my time on earth with as much life as possible, to become a little more human every day, and to understand that we only become human when we love.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“Even here, even as we suffer, life is still worth living....”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“A human being, as I've said before, gets used to anything.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“I tell them I am not at peace in spite of what I suffered, but because of it.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“I come from a plane that fell into the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for ten days. I have a friend up here who is injured. In the plane there is fourteen injured people. We have to get of here quickly and we don't have any food. We are weak. When are you going to come and fetch us? Please. We can't even walk. Where are we?”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“I saw the error I was making. I had been thinking of the disaster as a horrible mistake, as an unscripted deviation from the happy story of the life I had been promised. But now I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life, and the future that lay ahead was the only future available to me. To hide from this fact, or to live in bitterness and anger, would only keep me from living any genuine life at all.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“I have suffered great losses and have been blessed with great consolations, but whatever life may give me or take away, this is the simple wisdom that will always light my life: I have loved, passionately, fearlessly, with all my heart and all my soul, and I have been loved in return. For me, this is enough.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child,” Arturo answered. “The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can’t understand His will; He can’t be explained in a book. He didn’t abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change, He simply is. I don’t pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don’t need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.” I”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“Haal adem. Haal nog één keer adem. Elke keer dat je ademhaalt, leef je.”
― quote from Miracle in the Andes
“I’ve fought in three campaigns,” he began. “In seven pitched battles. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I’ve fought in the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I’ve been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I’ve known little else. I’ve seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that’s far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper.
“I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.”
He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
“rules exist for a reason. Rules exist because when people don't follow them, people get hurt.”
― Ally Carter, quote from Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover
“Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.”
― Laurence Sterne, quote from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Winter of Our Discontent
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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