“The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“Do you think . . . ?"
'I do sometimes, my boy,'admitted the old man. 'When I can't avoid it.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“I like 'fresh fruit flan'," said the donkey. "Three excellent words."
"I don't have one," said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in suprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even consider eating him.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“These were colours he'd never ever seen before; ones he couldn't possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well not exactly green, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the wooden letter sets, well, there were those who might have said that they were painted yellow and blue, but they would have said this knowing that such plain words were an outrageous insult to the colouring on the letters themselves.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“Here's a tip though', he told me, leaning over and pressing a hand into my shoulder. 'If you want to improve your time, run faster.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“It was important to look confident, he realized that very early on. After all, there was a terrible tendency among adults to look at children travelling alone as if they were planning a crime of some sort. None of them ever thought that it might just be a young chap on his way to see the world and have a great adventure. They were so small minded, grown-ups. That was one of their many problems.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
John Boyne
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
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“He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from Rivers of London
“It's obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quiet impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904
“I have often been criticized for being an 'emotional' leader, for not being macho enough, but even during this early stage in my career, I believed that the magic of command lies in openness, in being both sympathetic to the troops and at the same time being apart, in always projecting supreme confidence in my own ability and in theirs to accomplish whatever task is set for us.”
― Roméo Dallaire, quote from Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
“Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Black and Blue
“What the eyes don't see, the heart can't feel.”
― Dia Reeves, quote from Bleeding Violet
The Last Night of th...
Born in Shame
Late Call
Come to Me Quietly
Sparks Rise
Hard Rain FallingBookQuoters 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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