“We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“you know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?" he said.
I looked at him.
He said, "her punishment is being her,”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would inform the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“My own preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“She would say that we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Our windows were open, and the radio had been playing continuously--not one but two Billy Joel songs had come on during our drive--and the air was dense with the humidity of a midwestern summer, weather that even then made me homesick, though it was hard to say for what. Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would unfold the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“I want to open myself up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don’t want to be bound by the rules of this world. Does that make me a freak?”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself than looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“Rudolph Walsh, you are my fierce advocate, and your wit and wisdom”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
“we create our own reality—that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
Curtis Sittenfeld
Born place: in Cincinnati, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“the romantic, spendthrift moral act is ultimately the practical one—the practical, expendient, cozy-dog move is the one that comes to grief.”
― Anton Myrer, quote from Once An Eagle
“ MATTHEW'S RULES OF SURVIVAL
1. Sometimes, the people who mean you harm are the ones who say they love you.
2. Fear is your friend. When you feel it, act.
3. Protect the little ones.
4. If you coped before, you can cope now.
5. Always remember: In the end, the survivor gets to tell the story.”
― Nancy Werlin, quote from The Rules of Survival
“On a sunny Tuesday - for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday - six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars.”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from Everwild
“Liking someone doesn't make you weak.”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn't Have)
“Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.
I explored it all.
Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.
Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.
All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.
Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.”
― quote from Blindsight
Off Season
Do Hard Things: A Te...
Timbuktu
Magic to the Bone
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.
