Annabel Pitcher · 240 pages
Rating: (10.5K votes)
“I stared up at the sky and raised my middle finger, just in case God was watching. I don't like being spied on.”
“In fact she was quite bad and according to Jas she was naughty at school, but no one seems to remember that now she is all dead and perfect.”
“If guilt was an animal then it would be an octopus. All slimy and wriggly with hundreds of arms that wrap around your insides and squeeze them tight.”
“If envy is red and doubt is black then happiness is brown. I looked from the little brown stone to the tiny brown freckle to her huge brown eyes.”
“My sister Rose lives on the mantelpiece.
Well, some of her does.
A collarbone, two ribs, a bit of skull, and a little toe.”
“She said Halloween is a British tradition and it has nothing to do with being a Christian. I almost said Why do you celebrate it then 'cos I always forgot she was born in England.”
“I got you this. I held out the brown, fluffy bear. To replace Burt. I pulled his eyes off and everything.”
“We meet again, Spider-Man she said.
And I replied How many people have you saved today, Girl M.
She pretended to count on her fingers. Nine hundred and thirty-seven she shrugged. It's been a quiet day. We started to giggle. How about you, Spider-Man.
I scratched my head. Eight hundred and thirteen I said. But I started late and finished early. We exploded into laughter. We do the same joke every single day and it never ever gets boring.”
“I swallowed all the doubt and all the disappointment and all the anger and they were almost too big, like vitamin pills that are difficult to get down even with water.”
“Nonna dice sempre che la gente è verde d'invidia, ma io non sono d'accordo. Il verde è calmo, fresco, pulito e piacevole come il dentifricio alla menta. L'invidia invece è rossa. Ti brucia nelle vene e ti accende un fuoco nella pancia.”
“La tua forza mi dà il coraggio di volare.”
“When we were leaving London, Dad spent about an hour trying to push his wardrobe through the bedroom door. He turned it on its side. He tried it upside down. He tilted it one way and then the other but it just would not fit. Words like "Mum" and "Affair" and "Dad" and "Drinking" were just like that wardrobe--too big to get out. No matter what I did, I couldn't fit them through the space between my teeth.”
“The question is: Which means best advances the regulator’s goal, subject to the constraints (whether normative or material) that the regulator must recognize? My”
“Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren’t even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong.”
“That is what Reason can neither grasp nor endure, and what has offended all these men of outstanding talent who have been so received for so many centuries. Here they demand that God should act according to human justice, and do what seems right to them or else cease to be God.”
“As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.
Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men,
I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?”
“Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.”
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.