“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
“And suddenly I think: nothing is fine. It’s never fine. It’s always an illusion. Happy smiles, assurances, jokes, laughter—there’s no way to tell if it is real, or a mask. There’s always something terrible hurtling toward you, something that will destroy all that you love and alter your life forever. You may not know it, but it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do. No amount of hammering, or holy water, or screaming will change that.
You can scream no, and stop, and please, you can reach out and try to bend fate to your will with your own two hands, but it has already been decided. In every moment, a thousand accidents wait to happen, already in place and poised to strike, and we don’t even know it”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“An alcoholic. Amy stopped pushing her thumb against the dashboard. His mother had not been baking cookies. Probably she had been upstairs drinking gin from a bottle stored under the bed. Amy didn’t have a clear idea of what a woman alcoholic (a mother alcoholic) would be like, but her own mother had told her once that such women got very sneaky, hiding bottles under their bed.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Amy and Isabelle
“When we love most, and love happily, then we are at our topmost bent, and soar further above the earth than anything else can carry us.”
― H. Rider Haggard, quote from Dawn
“No,” Mike said. “You go talk to the Tarrytown guys. They should all be on the first floor catching lunch. See if you can’t convince them to join our cause.” “How convincing should I be?” Drew said, swinging the bat. Mike grabbed the bat. “We want them to help us, not join the guys trying to kill us.” Drew seemed deflated at having to leave his bat in the pile. “I don’t think I want your help,” Shay said. She was like a different person, all in-your-face and shut-the-hell-up. Mike slid the radio back into his cargo shorts. “I don’t think you have a choice.” “I”
― Dayna Lorentz, quote from No Easy Way Out
“We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. And not simply glimpsed—because certainly revelation is available outside of dogma; indeed all dogma, if it’s alive at all, is the result of revelation at one time or another—but gathered in. Definite beliefs are what make the radical mystery—those moments when we suddenly know there is a God, about whom we “know” absolutely nothing—accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots.”
― Christian Wiman, quote from My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Tiger's Destiny
Homeland
The Nanny Diaries
Nevermore
Written in My Own He...
The Laughing CorpseBookQuoters 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.
