Quotes from Selected Letters

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters

“Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters

“And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters

“It is much harder to be lonely, when you have for a while stopped being lonely. I was used to having only myself, cold and hard as that is; I could live with it. And now I wait, for a voice, a face, a body, that is not going to be here, is not mine, does not in any case wait as I do, nor share this homesickness. […] How to explain that I taught myself to be tough and indifferent, because it mattered too much and learned not even to weep in my mind not to notice.”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters

“I love you. Have a hell of a good time. I don’t really know what else is worth having.”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters

“People do not yet realize (because the mind isn't built that way) what war can be. They fear it but surely they fear it the way children fear nightmares, dimly, without definite images in their heads of how it will all work out.”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters

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Popular quotes

“You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from Fiesta

“How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality,”
― Robert McKee, quote from Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“What’s different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.