Quotes from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“It had that kind of open-ended fear to it - like that feeling you get when you're driving and you see a cop. And you're not speeding. You don't have drugs. But you're just thinking, I hope he doesn't notice I'm driving.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“When you're in a relationship with someone who's selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it's this souped-up shine. And you feel like you're in the club. And you don't even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I'm a big fan of pastries the size of a baby that contain enough calories for a year. That seems like an effective use of time.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I was a big dreamer and never particularly good at anything--a real dilemma. I wasn't terrible. I was just... okay. If you're terrible, you can write everybody off, like, "I don't know what the hell those idiots are doing?" I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Sometimes, when you want to be in a place so badly, you'll do anything.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I wake up at 4:30 am to jump on a plane, which is that part of the morning before the earth even exists. Before they've even programmed the Matrix. You walk out of your apartment and the road isn't even there. You walk out of your house, and there's just a guy with a laptop who yells, "We need a road, stat!" "How 'bout a building, Tank!”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“So I’m standing in a tree thirty feet above the pond with my three friends and my friend Pat says, “Dude, jump!” And I look down at the water, which is so far away, and I say, “That doesn’t seem like a good plan.” And they said, “Dude, we already jumped, it’s no biggie. What’s the worst thing that could happen? It’s only watah” (that’s “water” with a Boston accent), which is really flawed logic, that watah logic. I learn later that many bad things historically have happened in water. Shark attacks. Drowning. Bad sex. But my friend Nick makes an argument that in Massachusetts is irrefutable. He’s like, “Do it.” So I do.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“It was my first brush with live performance. And delusion. •”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase “Don’t tell anyone.” But not about creepy things. I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like I wouldn’t make the soccer team and my father would say, “Don’t tell anyone.” And I would say, “They’re gonna know when they show up to the games and I’m not on the team and I’m crying.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Looking back on it, could there possible have been a more confusing acronym for trying to keep kids from experimenting with drugs than DARE?
"Kids, we’re here today to DARE you not to do drugs! We DARE you to accept our DARE!"

"Office, does that mean you want us not to do drugs, or to do drugs?"
“We DARE you not to do drugs!”

"But I thought we weren’t supposed to do things We’re dared to do. If you dared me to jump out of a tree, I should do that, right?"

"It’s just an acronym, son."

"What is an acronym?”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“This is my situation. I'm the kind of person who, for fun, writes articles called 'Aviation Club Soars into Orbit!' and an unhappy bully I've never heard of is sending out envoys.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn't. I'm still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister's frequent flier miles just six days before.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“also put up with it because I couldn’t believe how lucky I was just to be with her. When you’re in a relationship with someone who’s selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it’s this souped-up shine. And you feel like you’re in the club. And you don’t even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“High school is not unlike a Mormon fundamentalist cult where the women are claimed by the older and more powerful.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I check my phone messages and email about forty-five times a day. I don’t even know what I’m expecting to get in these messages. Maybe Visa will call and say, “We just realized that we owe you money!” or I’ll get an email from a high school classmate that says, “We’ve reconsidered and we’ve decided you were cool after all.” Whatever”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“If you’re terrible, you can write everybody off, like, “I don’t know what the hell those idiots are doing?” I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me. In”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“That one’s yours and that one’s mine.” Like we’re cars. And I don’t feel like I’ve ever been one of the good cars. No one’s ever seen me and said, “I get that one!” They’re more like, “I get that one? Um, okay.” Or even, “I get that one? You owe me.” It’s so sad to think that people are incurring debt based on my appearance. I’d hate to hurt someone’s credit score. So”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Growing up, I was a big fan of the Indiana Jones movies. I watched them again recently and found them to be misleading. Aspiring archeologists across the world probably show up to their first day of work with their weather-worn fedoras and their whips and they’re like, “Where’s the cavern of jewels?” And their boss is like, “Actually, today we’re gonna start off by dusting thousands of miles of nothing.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Well, I’m not sure what happened next, but I ended up peeing on Mrs. Jarvis’s lawn.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

Popular quotes

“All whispers and echoes from a past that is gone teem into the sleeper's brain, and he is with them, and part of them.”
― Daphne du Maurier, quote from Frenchman's Creek

“Slowly his resistance ebbed. She felt the change in his body, the relaxing of tension, his shoulders curving around her as if he could draw her into himself. Murmuring her name, he brought her hand to his face and nuzzled ardently into her palm, his lips brushing the warm circlet of her gold wedding band. “My love is upon you,” he whispered…and she knew then that she had won.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Devil in Winter

“If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Last Chance to See

“I brush her hair back from her forehead. "You need to stop worrying about everything that can't be controlled." She signs and leans away from my hand, "That's just it, though. It's all I can think about anymore. It's like this fixation I have no control over which makes no sense because Im fixated on controlling the uncontrollable." She's breathing wildly. Shit. I need to calm her down.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Secret of Ella and Micha

“Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.”
― Aristotle, quote from The Nicomachean Ethics

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.