“You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“He’s funny and attractive. That doesn’t mean I want to sleep with him.” “That always means you want to sleep with someone.” “Thanks a lot,” I say. “Was that a thinly-veiled slut accusation?” “That’s funny, it wasn’t supposed to be thinly-veiled.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“What a dick,” she says. “You know what the worst part is?” “That there are forty people left in the world and he’s one of them?”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“As a child, I prayed she’d live, that she’d make it through the night. Eventually, I prayed she’d choke to death in her sleep. Not very kind, I know, but it would have meant escape. I was a prisoner of war in my mother’s battle with herself, and the only liberator was death.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“My mother will never make amends, will never be held accountable. She’s died just as selfishly as she lived. I contemplate kicking the bed. I go as far as lifting my foot but then imagine the rabbit hole of anger I’ll fall into if I give in to my wild urge. I won’t let my mother get to me.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“Everyone’s nice,” I say, and think of Paul. “Well, maybe not everyone, but I like everybody else. How about that?” I prod her with my elbow. “I like people.” “You know what’s happening? You’re having corrective emotional experiences. That’s where—” I groan. “No, we are not having a Psychoanalyze Sylvie session on the roof. We’re making fun of Paul and possibly shopping, not discussing correctional emotions or whatever.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“Dark humor is in our genes. I can die having laughed every chance I got, or I can die having been miserable. Either way, I’ll be dead. Besides, I didn’t mean it as much of a joke.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“I know this disbelief I feel, the disbelief on the others’ faces, is a survival mechanism. You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“If I stay within the tree line at the edge of the field, my buddies across the way won’t notice, as they’re now chasing a bird. The bird lands to peck at the grass and, when they get close again, it flaps another ten feet and lands. I think it’s fucking with them.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious
“the eminent physician and alienist, my good friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Alienist
“should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
“An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from My Name Is Asher Lev
“ I don't know"
"When a man says that, it usually means, "No, I won't but from time to time, I'll toy with the idea, so I can pretend i eventually intend to do it.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Assassin's Apprentice
“Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.”
― David Nicholls, quote from One Day
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.