“O love, how did you get here?
--Nick and the Candlestick”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“There is more than one good way to drown.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up
and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“The storerooms are full of hearts.
This is the city of spare parts.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won't notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“the cat unsheathes its claws
the world turns”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“No point making rules against things that are impossible.”
― G. Norman Lippert, quote from James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing
“Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years....
"All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Other Wind
“Es hermosa y más que hermosa: es sorprendente. Lo negro en ella abunda; y es nocturno y profundo cuanto inspira. Sus ojos son de astros en que centellea vagamente el misterio, y su mirada ilumina como el relámpago: es una explosión en las tinieblas.”
― Charles Baudelaire, quote from Paris Spleen
“The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives?...And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flyboys: A True Story of Courage
“Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
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.