“But when you’re a kid it’s like you’re wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can’t see anything except what’s in the dead center of the lenses”
― Russell Banks, quote from Rule of the Bone
“They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn't know the language or how anything here worked and hadn't arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they'd forgotten it so they couldn't be much company or help to each other either. They couldn't even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Rule of the Bone
“It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Rule of the Bone
“It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Rule of the Bone
“They were the only three people I'd chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, I was totally grateful to them.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Rule of the Bone
Russell Banks
Born place: in Newton, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date March 28, 1940
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“You can't lose what you never had.”
― Kathleen Peacock, quote from Hemlock
“They don’t make statues of people who walk behind others. You have to walk out in front.”
― Lindsay Buroker, quote from Blood and Betrayal
“Will this generation be able to turn things around and learn a valuable lesson from all of this? I hope so, but I have my doubts. The damage has been done. And as a lifelong student of history, it's quite evident that human beings don't learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
― quote from Voluntary
“Without action, knowledge is often meaningless.”
― Shawn Achor, quote from The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
“No one, certainly no teenager, was normal or felt they were. Everyone wore a kind of mask that kept people from really seeing what - or who - was inside”
― Gregg Olsen, quote from Envy
Politics
Mile High
Forbidden
The Game Changer
Kisscut
Beautiful RuinsBookQuoters 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.
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