“Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot
make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot — a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“We made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wired. No one even hit us with a water balloon.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing.
Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
“A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
Born place: in Omaha, Nebraska, The United States
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“Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“It is better to bow to the dictates of the wind than to try to chase or chain it.”
― Sharon Shinn, quote from Archangel
“Can you "choose" something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“Hope was all that stood between them and death.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
“That evening it was announced that curfew would be postponed until midnight, so that the families of those ‘sent for labour’ would have time to bring them blankets, a change of underwear and food for the journey. This ‘magnanimity’ on the part of the Germans was truly touching, and the Jewish police made much of it in an effort to win our confidence. Not until much later did I learn that the thousand men rounded up in the ghetto had been taken straight to the camp at Treblinka, so that the Germans could test the efficiency of the newly built gas chambers and crematorium furnaces.”
― Władysław Szpilman, quote from The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45
Dying of the Light
Berenice
Freddy and Frederick...
The Bostonians
The Blood of Others
My Notorious LifeBookQuoters 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.
