“She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
“Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
“I am not a pest," Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
“Poor Miss Binney, dressed like Mother Goose, now had the responsibility of sixty-eight boys and girls.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
“Ramona could not understand why grown-ups always talked about how quickly children grew up. Ramona thought growing up was the slowest thing there was, slower even than waiting for Christmas to come.
She had been waiting years just to get to kindergarten, and the last half hour was the slowest part of all.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
“That girl has been bad again,” Ramona heard the four-year-old next door say to her little sister.”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Ramona the Pest
“Yes, one of the benefits of being embarrassingly rich is that you find out if you have syphilis much earlier than the average peasant would.”
― Abigail Barnette, quote from The Boss
“I think the purest of souls, those with the most fragile of hearts, must be meant for a short life. They can't be tethered or held in your palm. Just like a sparrow, they light on your porch. Their song might be brief, but how greedy would we be to ask for more? No, you cannot keep a sparrow. You can only hope that as they fly away, they take a little bit of you with them.”
― Emm Cole, quote from The Short Life of Sparrows
“Mon frère, Claude,' urged Florence, leading me to a youth just like herself in broad shape and countenance. He talked rapidly with Florence, all the while tending a tiny copper saucepan. Then breaking off his talk, he reached for a teaspoon, and with all the worshipfulness of a priest at an altar, Claude tasted the shining stock, his face blank to all but his sense of taste.
'Quintessence,' whispered Florence, sniffing in awe at the rising steam. 'For many days the meat is reduced to create the soul of the sauce.' Then with measured care he reached for a lemon and squeezed in four steady drops.
The name of the dish was souffle, as the French write it. I wrote the particulars down, as it was a most magical dish. Who would have guessed that egg whites fraught for a long while could make a dish rise like a cloud? Once it had risen in a hot oven, Claude dressed the souffle with a ring of honeyed quintessence. It quivered on a pretty porcelain plate like a gently steaming puffball.”
― Martine Bailey, quote from An Appetite for Violets
“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. –B.F. Skinner”
― Mary Frame, quote from Imperfect Chemistry
“Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.~Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 mile race”
― Christopher McDougall, quote from Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, The Ultra-runners, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
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.