“Ari, maybe we should get you out of here. No joke. You really are dangerous with thus truth serum in you, You might sat something you wished you hadn't."
"Like that your mum scares me, but I think your dad is kind of cute in and old-guy sort of way?"
"Exactly like that."
"Eh. I'm not worried.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“Kyra." Fred caught Kyra's eyes. "I'm not in love with Ariana and I don't want half the kingdom."
"You don't?"
He shook his head. "But I might stick around for a little while longer. There are some interesting things in the Kingdom of Mohr."
"Like what?"
"Like a certain funny and extremely talented potioner."
Kyra took a breath. "I have to warn you, Hal isn't that great as a boyfriend. He's pretty self absorbed.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“I'm glad you escaped, Kyra," Fred said, looking serious again. "And that I found you."
"Me too," Kyra said, glancing up at him. "It wouldn't have been much of a life trying to live in the dumbwaiter."
Fred leaned down and kissed Kyra full on the lips.
Kyra pulled away. "How do you know I'm interested in you? Just because you've decided I'm worth hanging around for doesn't mean I feel the same way."
Fred cocked his head at her. "Really?"
"Oh, okay," Kyra said.
Then she kissed him back.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“Okay, that one's pretty good," Fred acknowledged, after she'd told him a particularly filthy joke. "But have you heard the one about the baker's wife?"
"No," Kyra said.
"Rumor has it, she married him for his buns." Fred burst out laughing.
Kyra groaned. "Okay, that was just bad.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“Ariana, there's a small rodent on your face. Thought you should know."
"It's a mustache. Kyra assured me that it's extremely convincing.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“How you look isn't about the face you were born with, it's what you do with it.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“You know,” he said, “you didn’t have to go to all of this trouble just to get my attention.”
― Bridget Zinn, quote from Poison
“Is this you giving me advice on how to survive a guy like you? Because that’s a little fucked up, even for you.”
― Annika Martin, quote from Prisoner
“I've always wanted to be a cat. Warm and domesticated when you want to be, wild when you don't.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from Now is Good
“it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, quote from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
“I stand guard,” Yasha said. He got out of the SUV and pulled a sawed-off shotgun out from under his seat.
“And keep our exit open,” Ian told him.
Yasha grinned crookedly. “Don’t I always?” He looked at me and his grin broadened. “Scream if something jumps at you.”
I tried for a grin; it felt more like a grimace. “Don’t I always?”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from The Grendel Affair
“I hadn’t wished for Trent in my life, but now that I had him, I was more confused, more heartbroken than I’d ever been. Trent was willing to sacrifice everything for me, but I didn’t know if I could let him.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from The Witch With No Name
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.