Quotes from Penpal

252 pages

Rating: (9.5K votes)


“We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.”
― quote from Penpal


“Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.”
― quote from Penpal


“Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves”
― quote from Penpal


“Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself. – Harlan Ellison”
― quote from Penpal


“Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time.
So we keep them in our memories.
And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.”
― quote from Penpal



“It’s a bit poetic that it is so easy to take advantage of those who have no advantages to begin with.”
― quote from Penpal


“The world is a cruel place made crueler still by man.”
― quote from Penpal


“a can-opener with no tuna made no sense to Boxes.”
― quote from Penpal


“Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”
― quote from Penpal


“Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories.”
― quote from Penpal



“How far can you go into the woods?”
― quote from Penpal


“Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer.”
― quote from Penpal


“far can you go into the woods?”
― quote from Penpal


“Our minds work hard to avoid dissonance – if we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world.”
― quote from Penpal


“Right as my eyes were about to move onto the next photo in the sequence, they froze and focused on something that vexed me so powerfully that I can now, as I write this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable of only a single, repeating thought. Why am I in this picture?”
― quote from Penpal



“When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember.”
― quote from Penpal


Popular quotes

“If this were a novel, you'd have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Something Rotten


“legalists and theological experts with “lips close to God and hearts far away from him” (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.”
― Dallas Willard, quote from The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God


“And Mendeleev’s guesses showed that induction is a more subtle process in the hands of a scientist than Bacon and other philosophers supposed. In science we do not simply march along a linear progression of known instances to unknown ones. Rather, we work as in a crossword puzzle, scanning two separate progressions for the points at which they intersect: that is where the unknown instances should be in hiding. Mendeleev scanned the progression of atomic weights in the columns, and the family likenesses in the rows, to pinpoint the missing elements at their intersections. By doing so, he made practical predictions, and he also made manifest (what is still poorly understood) how scientists actually carry out the process of induction. Very”
― Jacob Bronowski, quote from The Ascent of Man


“Well?" she teased in turn. "What do you think?"
The gray eyes that finally lifted to hers were flaming, but instead of answering, he flicked his burning gaze down her length again. He hesitated, and then said abruptly, "I think that the dress fits you perfectly."
Lauren burst out laughing. "Don't ever let anyone tell you that you have a way with flattery, because you don't."
"Is that right?" he mocked, his eyes challenging. "In that case, I'll you exactly what I think: I think that you're exquisitely lovely, and that you have the fascinating ability to look like an extremely sexy, sophisticated young woman and an utterly angelic girl at one and the same time. And I wish to hell that we weren't trapped here with a hundred other people for the next few hours, because whenever I look at you I become...uncomfortably eager...to find out how you're going to feel in my arms tonight.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Double Standards


“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ognize today.”
― David Graeber, quote from Debt: The First 5,000 Years


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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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