Allan Gurganus · 736 pages
Rating: (5.4K votes)
“Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“Truth always leaves a pleasure asking questions.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We've all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder how the Germans could have done it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job. --That's partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what's dreadful, dreadful. -- Honey? we've all got to be real careful of what we can get used to.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“(Spring is the earth forgiving itself.)”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“I started thinking of my absentee diamond. My thumb and little finger kept reaching for their pet and sidekick.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap show in daily episodes forever.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“Once you harden, the arteries do.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“Fifteen, that’s the age when the only world event that counts is whatever mood you’re in that day.”
― Allan Gurganus, quote from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
“Information, as narrowly defined by Shannon, concerns the predictability of a message source. In the real world, however, information is something that is analyzed for meaning, that is remembered and combined with other information, and that produces results or actions. In short, information is processed via computation.”
― quote from Complexity: A Guided Tour
“In life, if one wants seriously to understand how the world works, he must die at least once.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“I’m a firm believer in equality at all times—”
“At all times?” She glanced at the cuffs clipped to his leathers. “Why do I find that hard to believe?” And why the heck was she arguing with him. Mine, mine, mine.
“At all times,” he repeated. “However, in the bedroom or in the club, I am a lot more equal than you.”
― Cherise Sinclair, quote from Dark Citadel
“Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
“Stony One replies, in a general way, ‘All right. Everybody knows where to find Durdles, when he’s wanted.’ Which, if not strictly true, is approximately so, if taken to express that Durdles may always be found in a state of vagabondage somewhere.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from The Mystery of Edwin Drood
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.