“Where are you from, Mr. Pendergast? Can't quite place the accent.”
“New Orleans.”
“What a coincidence! I went there for Mardi Gras once."
“How nice for you. I myself have never attended.”
Ludwig paused, the smile frozen on his face, wondering how to steer the conversation onto a more pertinent topic.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Still Life With Crows
“I have found that liars in the end communicate more truth than do truth tellers.” “How’s that?” “Because truth is the safest lie.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Still Life With Crows
“quotation from Einstein: ‘The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.’ I would suggest to Dr. Chauncy that in combination, the two qualities are even more alarming.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Still Life With Crows
“Chauncy made a huge effort to control himself. “I had lunch at Maisie’s Diner.”
“And?”
“And what? It was the most revolting lunch it has been my misfortune to consume.”
“And after?”
“Diarrhea, of course.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Still Life With Crows
“She picked up the book she was reading, Beyond the Ice Limit, found her dog-eared place at the beginning of chapter six, and began to read. The sea horizon lay against the sky, blue against perfect blue, and it seemed to beckon the ship southward, ever southward. She closed the book, put it down again. Not bad, but it lacked the punch of the original.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Still Life With Crows
“You, you insolent brazen bitch—you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father’s face?”
― Homer, quote from The Iliad of Homer
“when you completely trust a person with all your heart, you either get a friend for life or a lesson for life!”
― quote from You’re the Password to My Life
“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
“if fallacious reasoning always led to absurd conclusions, it would be found out at once and corrected. But once an easy, shortcut mode of reasoning has led to a few correct results, almost everybody accepts it; those who try to warn against it are not listened to.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
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.