“They're your parents. They're meant to love you because. Never in spite.”
“It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving.”
“Maybe hearts don't ever stop breaking once broken.”
“Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It's the worst kind of regret.”
“Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.”
“Little girls aren't naturally lost," Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. "Someone makes them that way.”
“It may cost you, my Queen. It may cost you dear."
"All the best journeys do, faun.”
“Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.”
“If you can't pray it away, it's not a real problem.”
“Tread carefully, Marty. I mean it. The world has completely changed around you while you weren't looking.”
“Marty: Dad's right about you. You got lost on your journey somewhere.
Adam: That's what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place.”
“And there. The power of a word. The power of one word. That's where it all changes.”
“People with really stiff morals are easier to tip over.”
“Maybe there didn’t have to be any other reasons. Maybe love made you stupid. Maybe loneliness did.”
“Raising his eyes to look directly into Linus's face was maybe the scariest thing he'd had to do all day long, but it was only the free-falling terror that always accompanied hope.”
“Adam’s stomach was tumbling with how much Linus knew and how he’d found it all out (it would turn out he knew as much as nearly everyone else in the school, which was a lot, but it also turned out that – in that unreachable, possible world – most of them actually liked Adam or at least didn’t actively wish him harm, so they’d given his sorrow some space; when Adam thought about it now, it still made his head swim, still made him blush, still made him wish he could crawl under a blanket and die there forever) – but looking at Linus, he saw no malice, no gossip, saw instead someone who might actually know.”
“She can smell him now, a smudge of unwashed skin, poverty, extreme loneliness. She takes the can, still holding his hand, unrolling it, running a finger across its weathered palm.”
“Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening.”
“If she needed him, he'd be there instantly, no questions asked, and he knew she'd do the same. She was here now. They had their bulgogi. This is what a family was. Or should be.”
“Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It’s the worst kind of regret.”
“But here, now, again, this was more than the body, or the mind, or the personality. It wasn't holy, that was a whole other mess, but it was something that could be touched only here.”
“But then she thinks, feels, reaches out, and knowing exactly what blame is - a human construct, one of its blackest and more selfish and self-blinding - she can find further strands of it, emanating in all directions, for blame is something that is shared but denied in equal measure.”
“an act that didn't feel like penetration, but like combination”
“Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.”
“Bonds are like rules, they're meant to be broken.”
“I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.”
“Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.”
“The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen.
This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you--the ability to imagine.”
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.