“We're all just in the muck trying to believe we're capable of greatness, but closer to breaking than we want to admit. And we tell ourselves stories--about ourselves,but maybe also all these stories about other people, about characters--as a way to hide from how small we are.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“It's what happens. You love, then you lose, then you die. Even if you survive, you die.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“It's not a bad way to live once you let go of the idea that you deserve more.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“-It's extremely cool how the words can stay the same but their meaning can change.
-Because the reader changes.
-EXACTLY”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?" "I don't trust anyone who wouldn't.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“- I can't make choices like that without knowing who I am. Without knowing all the implications.
- You can't ever know in advance. Big decisions require faith.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“A person is no more & no less than the Story of his Passions & Deeds.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“They're not terrible people. They just couldn't be who I needed them to be.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“It was stolen. As most beautiful things eventually are.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“They all occupied the same space but did not occupy it together. Imagine a thousand leaves of tracing paper, each with one person lightly pencilled on it, all stacked atop a scene of a frozen city block. A thousand discreet and solitary realities that appear to be occurring in the same location.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“He is a man without a past sailing in a strange sea in a world where the stars have come loose in the firmament.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“-I hate that. I hate that people can't just say what they mean.
-You don't. Not always.
-I never say anything I don't mean. I just avoid saying some things that I do.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“The thing is: you might be right to trust someone at one point, but they can change."
"+ in between they must be drifting from trustworthy to not. But you can't tell how far they've drifted until it's too late.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“For one moment, it is more important to take in the spectacular than to worry about the pressing business of staying alive.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“I think it's love.'
'Funny.'
'I'm serious.'
'And your support for this is...?'
'A feeling.'
'You need more than that.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin. Words are a gift to the dead and a warning to the living.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“There's a spiritual connection between flame and narrative.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“This is what happens, of course: men get lost, men vanish, men are erased and reborn.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“Time and circumstances change us...and it is pointless to ask why.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fragment of an idea of a memory, or something his mind, desperate for connections, has created on its own.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“-That's kind of sad.
-I used to think so. Now I think: you're born a certain way. Later you get to decide how much you want to fight/change that. I don't mind being alone.
-You must mind. If you didn't you wouldn't be doing this with me.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“This is where his life - his remade life - has brought him. Each strange juncture has led to the next and now he is here. He is here, and it is nowhere.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“They speak little; it is as if the air has been churned up with decade's worth of fruitless pursuit and missed connections and thoughts unspoken, and they are waiting quietly for all this matter — these motes of opportunity forgone — to settle around them.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“The feeling, for those seconds, is glorious—it reminds him that he is human, that he is so insignificant as to be utterly free, and he is being guided along gracefully, lovingly, by the hand of Nature—and it frees him, however transiently, from all worry and fear and fury and grief. 'I enjoyed that,' he says aloud, as much to the stars as to the rower.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?'
'I don't trust anyone who wouldn't.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“If I am going out into the unknown, it might as well be the really unknown.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“When you fall in love, friends, let yourself fall.”
― J.J. Abrams, quote from S.
“I let myself have feelings for you despite not knowing how this would end.”
― Siobhan Vivian, quote from Not That Kind of Girl
“Do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of texts, by logic, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think, ‘The ascetic is our teacher.’4 But when you know for yourselves, ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them.”
― Bhikkhu Bodhi, quote from In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon
“per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number”
― Tarquin Hall, quote from The Case of the Missing Servant
“I am nothing like my father. While he prays for war, I pray for peace.
And now we go our separate ways, each believing that we are right.
My father has made his choice, and I have made mine.
I am, at last, my own man.
I can live with that.”
― Jean Sasson, quote from Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
“...the [Hawthorn] report revealed the logical fallacy that has haunted Indian history and policy in North America since contact - to wit, that all people yearn for the individual freedom to pursue economic goals. Indians are people, ergo, they want to make money and create wealth for themselves and their families.”
― Thomas King, quote from The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
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.
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