Quotes from Once Was Lost

“I wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“It's not words, so much, just my mind going blank and thoughts reaching up up up, me wishing I could climb through the ceiling and over the stars until I can find God, really see God, and know once and for all that everything I've believed my whole life is true, and real. Or, not even everything. Not even half. Just the part about someone or something bigger than us who doesn't lose track. I want to believe the stories, that there really is someone who would search the whole mountainside just to find that one lost thing that he loves, and bring it home.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don't think it works quite like that. You can't just erase everything that came before.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“It's like a Venn diagram of tragedy.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“We'd need a miracle," he says. "A real one. Do you think those happen anymore?”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“It makes me think of Lazarus. He must have had those shadows after his miracle. You don't spend time in the tomb without it changing you, and everyone who was waiting for you to come out.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“Mom always says that doubt is just another way of expressing faith.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“The Lord doesn't give a person more than he knows they can bear.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“Right now I would love to have a personal message from God. I want to believe the way I used to, when my dad or mom or sometimes both of them would pray with me at night and I would picture God listening, kind-eyed and bearded. He was real to me, as real as my own parents. I don't know when God stopped being someone I saw as my true friend, and turned into something I'm mostly confused about.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“Now I think miracles are things that happen in stained glass, and on dusty Jerusalem roads thousands of years ago. Not here, not to us. Not when we need them.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“Mom always says that doubt is just another way of expressing faith...
This is different than doubt. This is something I've never felt before, a total absence of whatever it is that's made me who I am, on the inside, all my life.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

“Right now it's like we're three islands, and nothing but oceans between us.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from Once Was Lost

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Popular quotes

“Looking after the baby is like taking some sort of terrifying, never-ending practical exam. All she does is respond to what the baby is doing. Feed baby. Change baby. Wash baby. Keep baby alive. Prepare for when baby wakes again.”
― Liane Moriarty, quote from The Last Anniversary

“Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin.
The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that’s part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather’s time, committed great evil.
In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal?
Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.”
― Ken Liu, quote from The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Here.” He lifted the jiswar into her arms. “You have the distinct appearance of a woman in need of something warm and furry.” The”
― K.M. Weiland, quote from Dreamlander

“The Republic, Plato writes: The stars that decorate the sky, though we rightly regard them as the finest and most perfect of visible things, are far inferior, just because they are visible, to the true realities; that is, to the true relative velocities, in pure numbers and perfect figures, of the orbits and what they carry in them, which are perceptible to reason and thought but not visible to the eye … We shall therefore treat astronomy, like geometry, as setting us problems for solution, and ignore the visible heavens, if we want to make a genuine study of the subject …127 This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be known by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years.”
― quote from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“After all, once there was a girl named Lucy who loved her family, old and new.
It's not the type of love that ends.”
― Emery Lord, quote from The Names They Gave Us

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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.

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