“When in doubt keep reading. A book will never die on you”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“Roll call. (We have to start every day with this just to check nobody has run away or died in their beds.)”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“So, Milton,” he said, “welcome to paradise lost.”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“(I can't believe this beautiful woman who looks like a forest fairy could have married Sparerib.) Boggs rates her breasts as incredible. I must admit they are impressive.”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“Mad Dog hasn’t spent much time in the dormitory and seems to do a lot of hunting.”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“school). He has a very posh English accent and strides around with a walking stick, swearing like a maniac.”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“When I leave school I will drive around looking for prostitutes like Julia.”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“I thought about my friend and wondered if his ghost was here with Macarthur. Or maybe they were in heaven somewhere watching me sing with Gecko telling the old man he was getting goosebumps.”
― John van de Ruit, quote from Spud
“When you are young you believe the world is all yours, glorious and exhilarating and fascinating and full of promise and trumpets and drums and marches and new worlds,” said Charles. “We don’t ask ourselves what we are living for then. We know. But we forget, later, or it all seems a foolish dream.”
― Taylor Caldwell, quote from Captains and the Kings
“I had a lovely childhood in Ireland, riding, hunting, and a great big, bare, draughty house with lots and lots of sun in it. If you’ve had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you, can they? It was afterwards—when I grew up—that things seemed always to go wrong.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from A Pocket Full of Rye
“We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it.
Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.
Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.”
― Naomi Wolf, quote from The Beauty Myth
“He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras — they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’— kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.
The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.”
― George Orwell, quote from Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“A conversation between Ellie and her mom:
[Ellie] "I guess it's true that love makes you blind."
"No," my mom said. "It doesn't make you blind. You're very, very aware of everything about the one you truly love, whether you know it from what your eyes tell you or your heart. So no, love doesn't make you blind. It paralyzes until you can't breathe or run away from it.”
― Courtney Allison Moulton, quote from Wings of the Wicked
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.