“Which is why she’d fallen desperately in love the first time she’d met Sharlah. She’d looked into her foster daughter’s eyes and she’d known her. Just . . . known her. Sharlah’s fears, anxieties, fragile hope, bone-deep strength. Rainie saw all of her daughter. And she loved her, not in spite of her weaknesses, but because of them. Sharlah was a fighter.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“And how many episodes of being “not yourself” do you get before people figure out this is who you really are? I”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“Family is family. Even if you hate them, it’s hard to let go.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“can’t do this. I suck at this. Which is why they’re making me go. Not to improve my swimming—who cares about that?—but to work on that whole playing-well-with-others thing. Another one of my broken bits. I don’t want to socialize with other kids. I don’t trust ’em, I don’t like ’em, and best I can tell, the feeling’s mutual.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“approached alone, the hallway too small, the rooms too tightly bunched”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“Families aren’t built in a day. But they can be destroyed in an instant.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“For a bit, he picked up the paperbacks, thumbed the worn edges. Military thrillers. Books with clear right and wrong where the good guys always won in the end. Zero or hero. A part of Telly clearly wanted to be the hero. The brother who’d saved his sister. The troubled teen who, according to his PO, was trying to do better.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“Warn a kid with oppositional defiant disorder not to do something, and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the crime.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“This new generation, they’ve been raised by their parents to assume they’ll start at the top. No scut for them. They’ll just sit in their parents’ basement till the job offer for partner comes in.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“Is your father really evil?” I heard myself ask. “Yes.” “Because he drank, did drugs?” “No, honey. Because God made him that way, and he liked it. Your father had an excuse. My father doesn’t.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“We are all a little bit broken, she tells me (the reason she doesn’t sleep at night?), but we all work on fixing ourselves.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from Right Behind You
“If I wanted death, Edward would give it to me. Because we both understand that it isn't death that we fear. It's living.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Obsidian Butterfly
“and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her dream -- dream? -- of a new life with me -- please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he tried... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost. -- Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart.”
― Malcolm Lowry, quote from Under the Volcano
“In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, quote from Infidel
“The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Anathem
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.