“Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“The evening wasn’t cold yet... But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“You don't deserve it, he said aloud. Don't ever begin to think that you do.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“The shaggy saddle horses, already winter-coated, stood with their backs to the wind, watching the two men in the corral, the horses’ tails blowing out, their breath snorted out in white plumes and carried away in tatters by the wind.”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“Don’t you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don’t act like it. I don’t intend to. It doesn’t do much good, does it?”
― Kent Haruf, quote from Plainsong
“Julius rose to his feet. The towel dropped, showering cut brown hair over Monna Alessandra's elegant tiles. His hair, finely tailored, clung to a thick-boned face with slanting eyes and a blunt profile which would have looked well on a coin. Tobie, who had almost no hair, gazed at him sadly.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from The Spring of the Ram
“The people welcome a new da yas if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.”
― Nancy Mitford, quote from The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate
“I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from. In recent years this condition has, if anything, become worse: I go to and from Vienna at diminishing intervals, and from Nathal I will often go to some other big city, to Venice or Rome and back, or to Prague and back. The truth is that I am happy only when I am sitting in the car , between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. I am happy only when I am traveling; when I arrive, no matter where, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only between places.”
― Thomas Bernhard, quote from Wittgenstein's Nephew
“A Magnificent Banquet, being
A Thanksgiving for the Safe Return
Of our Beloved Daughter,
Princess Esmeralda.
Bring your own plates.”
― Angie Sage, quote from Physik
“She had already decided that, when she grew up, she was going to do whatever she pleased and not let anyone order her about.”
― Alison Weir, quote from The Lady Elizabeth
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.