Quotes from Summer of My German Soldier

“Even if you forget everything else I want you to always remember that you are a person of value, and you have a friend who loved you enough to give you his most valued possession.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“Like the Bible tells us, when a man will lay down his life for a friend, well, then there ain't no greater love in this here world than that.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“And marking off time struck me as something like counting empty spaces—spaces you know can't ever be filled.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“It seems to me that a man who is incapable of humor is capable of cruelty.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“What do you know about sooner or later? Is a moment only a moment when you're in pain?”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“A person's got to think, otherwise that person's no better than a trained seal balancing a ball on his nose. If only that seal could think, he'd know he was making a thousand children laugh.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“Keep in mind that life produces no maestros, only students of varying shades of ineptitude.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“I wondered if a blessing is still a blessing if it lasts for only a little while.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“Fun, like champagne bubbles, can't completely fill you up.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“I believe that love is better than hate. And that there is more nobility in building a chicken coop than in destroying a cathedral.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“The ways of the Lord are filled with wonder and mystery.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“When people's emotions are involved they don't want to listen.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“Folks keep forgetting that wishing don't make nothing so, but prayer sometimes do.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“The secret is in absolutely refusing to let the river beat you down. If I had to, I'd measure my progress in inches. One more inch I've swum—one less inch to swim. Once you know the secret, then nobody's river can bring you down.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“Sometimes when a person be thinking about one thing it don't mean they is mad about another thing.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“One thing you can say about him is that he's appreciative. He's just happy having someone to sit with.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“The secret is in absolutely refusing to let the river beat you down.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“But you, Pearl, never liked anything once it was yours.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“My father chose acquiescence and life rather than resistance and death. Not a very admirable choice, but a very human one.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

“My deception was believed because it was built on a foundation of truth … Hitler's first layer is an undeniable truth, such as: The German workers are poor. The second layer is divided equally between flattery and truth: The German worker deserves to be prosperous. The third layer is fabrication: The Jews and the Communists and Jews have stolen what is rightfully yours.”
― Bette Greene, quote from Summer of My German Soldier

About the author

Popular quotes

“Never in my life had I felt as exposed as I did right then. Her fingertips softened as they traced along the outline of my sins, as she caressed the markings of every mistake I’d ever made as if this girl somehow found some kind of beauty in them.”
― A.L. Jackson, quote from Come to Me Quietly

“Maybe that's the whole point-life showing me how good it could be, letting me have it just long enough to want it more than I've ever wanted anything else, only to rip it away. When you have nothing for so long, you forget the terror of having something to lose.”
― Alexandra Bracken, quote from Sparks Rise

“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling

“be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.”
― Joey Graceffa, quote from In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World

“The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get ‘em up dancin.’ It’s not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audience’s mind with their pieties and their sense of “community,” i.e., ram it home that you’re one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.