“Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust - too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished - that animates him.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“All the picketers look bored and hot and like they”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“You have to do what your heart dictates," Vivian says.
"Do you believe that?"
"Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“Oh lord and master. High muckety-muck.”
― Cherise Sinclair, quote from Make Me, Sir
“I don't taste and tell. Don't worry though. I'm very selective”
― Kallypso Masters, quote from Nobody's Hero
“No social being is less protected than the young Parisian girl—by laws, regulations, and social customs.”
― Cathy Marie Buchanan, quote from The Painted Girls
“There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another, and I was like wax in Zinaïda's hands; though, indeed, I was not the only one in love with her. All the men who visited the house were crazy over her, and she kept them all in leading-strings at her feet. It amused her to arouse their hopes and then their fears, to turn them round her finger (she used to call it knocking their heads together), while they never dreamed of offering resistance and eagerly submitted to her. About her whole being, so full of life and beauty, there was a peculiarly bewitching mixture of slyness and carelessness, of artificiality and simplicity, of composure and frolicsomeness; about everything she did or said, about every action of hers, there clung a delicate, fine charm, in which an individual power was manifest at work. And her face was ever changing, working too; it expressed, almost at the same time, irony, dreaminess, and passion. Various emotions, delicate and quick-changing as the shadows of clouds on a sunny day of wind, chased one another continually over her lips and eyes.”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from First Love
“At night, when no one's there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there's a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
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.