“How else, except through being alone for a while, could you ever discover who you really are? But”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“Michel, the tight-jawed president of the Black Student Caucus, who called her “little sister” and would have had potential if he’d remembered to sprinkle in some fun between bouts of righteous indignation.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“Your strength is the strength of stones. Suddenly,”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“We only waste energy to have horrible fights with the people we love the most.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“If you believe it, Khaldun had said, I could never convince you otherwise. If you do not, nothing I tell you could sway you. I am the one who should be asking you: Is it the truth? No,”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“When my first wife died long ago, in Ethiopia, I thought I knew grief. But until you have witnessed the death of a loved one to another man’s violence, you know nothing of grief.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That’s all life is, on this earth anyway.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“a remark Khaldun had made once, when Dawit returned from the battlefield against the Italians: What do you gain from it, Dawit? Must a scythe prove itself sharper than a blade of grass? Let grass grow as it will. While”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“They had to work at it, but they found their common ground. Ultimately, though, their differences returned, and she wondered how deeply they ran. How could she continue to overlook them, when they loomed so large? Jessica”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“Is that your lesson?” she asked him. “I’m sorry to hear that, because you always said just the opposite. Love what you have while you have it, before it’s gone. Isn’t that what you were always trying to tell me?” Her damp eyes glimmered.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
Tananarive Due
Born place: in The United States
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“Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother’s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down iniquitous men, the concept of blades slashing down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai “fell like the cherry blossoms,” his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry. For Isao, to die purely seemed easy. But what about laughing purely? How to be pure in all respects was a problem that disturbed him. No matter how tight a rein he kept upon his emotions, there were times when some trivial thing would arise to make him laugh. Once, for example, he had laughed at a puppy frolicking at the side of the road, with a woman’s high-heeled shoe, of all things, in its mouth. It was the kind of laugh that he preferred others not to see.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from Runaway Horses
“For Swan's birthday, Calla made pineapple upside-down cake, which is not the kind of cad you put candles on. So there was nothing to blow and make wishes on. Nobody missed the candles, because when you're eating pineapple upside-down cake, there is nothing much left to wish for”
― Jenny Wingfield, quote from The Homecoming of Samuel Lake
“But what if we find we don't suit?"
"Then ye'll do as the rest o' us and work at suiting.”
― Karen Hawkins, quote from Sleepless in Scotland
“It did not occur to me at the time that her radiance had a spiritual dimension, owing nothing to the values of the temporal world.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times
“He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others”
― Elliot Perlman, quote from Seven Types of Ambiguity
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Leaves of Grass: The...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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