“Never say 'I can't.' 'I can't' is a limit, and life is about breaking through limits. Say 'I will' instead.”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, quote from Pies & Prejudice
“Robin Hood just called, he wants Sherwood Forest back.”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, quote from Pies & Prejudice
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single girl in possesion of a pashon for fashon, must be in want of an audiance!”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, quote from Pies & Prejudice
“Math is “maths,” an elevator is a “lift,” a truck is a “lorry,” a flashlight is a “torch,” and “crisps” are what they call potato chips, while “chips” over here means French fries. Just as riding the double-decker buses thrills me, I get a thrill out of hearing people talk.”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, quote from Pies & Prejudice
“Would I want to know the ending to my own story? No. I want the adventure that comes with finding out.”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, quote from Pies & Prejudice
“Football means soccer, squash is soda, bonkers is nuts—I’m going to need an interpreter or something.”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, quote from Pies & Prejudice
“Everything's always ending. But everything's always beginning, too.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“...I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from South of Broad
“There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Cathedral
“As I helped him up, I felt him shake all over, so I asked him to forgive me, without knowing what for, but that was my lot, asking forgiveness, I even asked forgiveness of myself for being what I was, what it was my nature to be.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, quote from Too Loud a Solitude
“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.
Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.
Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?
At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego.
Just what kind of narrative?
It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
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.