“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
“Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.
It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.
The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered. ”
― Adam Hochschild, quote from King Leopold's Ghost
“You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Brokeback Mountain
“She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view – the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you”
― Jay McInerney, quote from Bright Lights, Big City
“She siged, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from Body Double
“ Visto despuès, podría parecer un modo extraño de empezar una guerra. Solo uno de los implicados sabía de lo que de verdad sucedía, y por casualidad ”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Debt of Honor
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.