“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.”
“We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.”
“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”
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.”
“But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”
“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.”
“...slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to.”
“Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.”
“Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.”
“Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.”
“Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.”
“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.”
“We are as ephemeral as rain drops.”
“I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.”
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.”
“But physicians don’t really save lives, of course, we prolong them;”
“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.”
“Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them...”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“A real man—real in all the ways that we recognize as real—finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world—the real world—will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive. The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no “real” danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world. Question: is the man’s behavior courageous or cowardly? This is the fundamental question of ethics. Ethics!”
“And as he held his first true lover against him, feeling that familiar difference in their heights and smelling that wonderful cologne, part of him wanted to debate this break up until they both gave in and kept trying.
But that wasn’t fair.”
“There is no day that one should skip
But one should seize, without distrust,
The possible with iron grip”
“Sunshine, I... Starla's voice broke off as she entered the room and caught sight of him standing naked in the corner. She eyed him in an odd, detached way, as if he were an interesting piece of furniture.
Talon and modesty were strangers, but the way she stared at him made him damned uncomfortable. In spite of the sunlight, Talon grabbed the pink blanket off the bed and clutched it to his middle.
You know, Sunshine, you need to find a man like that to marry. Someone so well hung that even after three or four kids, he'd still be wall to wall.
Talon gaped.
Sunshine laughed. "Starla, you're embarrassing him.”
“Ivy had once said that sharing blood was a way to show deep affection, loyalty, and friendship. I felt that way about her, but what she wanted from me was so far from what I understood that I was afraid. She wanted to share with me something so complex and intangible that the shallow emotional vocabulary of human and witch didn’t have the words or cultural background to define it. She was waiting for me to figure it out. And I lumped it all with sex because I didn’t understand.”
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.