“Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Only in homeopathy do you get specific remedies for people who believe they are made of glass, have a delusion that they are selling green vegetables, or have an aptitude for, or a horror of, mathematics.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Someone who has the delusion Glass, is made of, does not literally believe herself to be made of glass but rather feels fragile and brittle, as if she might break. This might be someone who constantly thinks bad things are going to happen to her, or someone coming off drugs, perhaps, feeling she might break down.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
Scarlett Thomas
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
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“the unexpected moment [is] always sweeter.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from The Viscount Who Loved Me
“ALBINOS DEMAND ACTION ON MOVIE SLUR The albino community demanded action yesterday to stop their unfair depiction as yet another movie featured an albino as a deranged hitman. “We’ve had enough,” said Mr. Silas yesterday at a small rally of albinos at London’s Pinewood Studios. “Just because of an unusual genetic abnormality, Hollywood thinks it can portray us as dysfunctional social pariahs. Ask yourself this: Have you ever been, or know anyone who has ever been, a victim of albino crime?” The protest follows hot on the heels of last week’s demonstrations when Colombians and men with ponytails complained of being unrelentingly portrayed as drug dealers. —Extract from The Mole, July 31, 2003”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from The Big Over Easy
“He had all the self-preservation instincts of a bug near a shiny windshield.”
― Karen Chance, quote from Embrace the Night
“Much better left alone,’ chimed in old Jack Linden sagely, ‘argyfying about politics generally ends up with a bloody row an’ does no good to nobody.”
― Robert Tressell, quote from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
“Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten.”
― John Cheever, quote from The Stories of John Cheever
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The Civil War, Vol....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.
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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.
