“And how do you undo damage that’s been built into the foundations? With houses, it’s easier to pull the whole thing down and start again. You can’t do that with people.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“it was like glass sandpaper being rubbed on my skin.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“Better to start too slowly and build up,” said a piece of text in italics, “than start too quickly and give up.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“If you call the day after, you’re maybe a bit desperate because, since the first day is out of the question, the second day is really the first day, so you’re calling on the first day. If they’re going to call, people call on the third day.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“Within families, you’re stuck with the character they think you are, whatever you do. You become a war hero and all that your parents ever talk about is something supposedly funny you used to do when you were in nursery school.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“You cannot!' Tatiana said sharply. 'If you order a gun there is only a single shot, and once delivered the doors are locked and will not open until it has been fired.”
― quote from The Zombie Room
“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.”
― Elizabeth Berg, quote from Open House
“When we get presidents with brains it's purely by accident. Who was ever selected for his brains? We choose them for other qualities, or because they can be elected.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“some student who’d been caught putting bumper stickers that said ‘Gas Guzzler’ on every SUV in the parking lot.”
― Katie Alender, quote from Bad Girls Don't Die
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.