“There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“...slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“We are as ephemeral as rain drops.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“But physicians don’t really save lives, of course, we prolong them;”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“And don’t you dare say you love me, because I know that’s not true. You don’t know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you’re in love. It’s nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them...”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Maybe this was what the media was calling “desperate euphoria”—the we’re-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even unlikely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
Robert Charles Wilson
Born place: in Whittier, California, The United States
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“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." (From the Introduction of 1941's The Garden of Forking Paths)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from Ficciones
“I suggest to you that, although you may have endeavored to gloss over the fact to yourself, you did deliberately set about taking your husband from your friend. I suggest that you felt strongly attracted to him at once. But I suggest that there was a moment when you hesitated, when you realized that there was a choice–that you could refrain or go on. I suggest that the initiative rested with you–not with Monsieur Doyle. … You had everything, Madame, that life can offer. Your friend’s life was bound up in one person. You knew that, but, though you hesitated, you did not hold your hand. You stretched it out and, like the rich man in the Bible, you took the poor man’s one ewe lamb.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Death on the Nile
“Good and bad, strengths and faults, he was hers forever.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Lucky One
“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.”
― Robert Frost, quote from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Collected Poems, Complete & Unabridged)
“What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.
Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
We'll Always Have Su...
United We Spy
The Ancestor's Tale:...
The Guns of August
The Grim Grotto
Erak's RansomBookQuoters 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.
