“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.
-
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
See more on GoodReads
“She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax - and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Guest Room
“In olden times, when wishing still helped....”
- The Frog King | The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”
― Jacob Grimm, quote from Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales
“Iwent to school with African-American girls during my entire adolescence in Michigan and never noticed them as potential girlfriends, never even wanted to meet them. How did that happen? I'm nine thousand miles from home and a pernicious wall of segregation I never noticed in high school suddenly materialises. A young man should travel.”
― quote from Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone
“He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Mr. Sammler's Planet
“No pain that we suffer, lass, no trial that we experience is ever for naught. Hardships teach us qualities we can get in no other way. Like patience, faith, fortitude . . . and humility.”
― Jeff Wheeler, quote from The Hollow Crown
Insight
Tiger Lily
La reina del sur
Black Ice
Sweet Hope
DustBookQuoters 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.
