“People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“I don't mean to be insolent. I'm truthful. I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. For instance, you have bad breath, Lieutenant. I can smell it from here. It must offend a lot of people. That's the truth. But how many people have told you that? Instead, they either lie or try to avoid your company.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“Pluck my heart
From my flesh
And eat it.....”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“Eat my heart
Chew it hard
Swallow my soul, too”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“Eric Poole began with cats. Or, to be more exact, kittens.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“He looks at me fondly. I know that the look doesn’t have love in it. Or even lust. I still wonder about love or sex or lust. I saw lust in his eyes when he looked at that girl on the sidewalk … I love him, anyway. I love him because he’s kind to me and he doesn’t want my body, doesn’t want to feel me or touch me, like all the others … and maybe after a while he might look at me with more than fondness, will kiss me sweetly, tenderly.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“A smile for all the stupid people out there with bleeding hearts for serial killers.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can’t deny your own kin.”
― William Gay, quote from Provinces of Night
“You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are?”
― Lauren Beukes, quote from The Shining Girls
“When it’s quiet in my head like this, that’s when the voice doesn’t need to tell me how pathetic I am. I know it in the deepest part of me. When it’s quiet like this, that’s when I truly hate myself.”
― Portia de Rossi, quote from Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
“The meeting started, and I could barely listen for my self-mortification. I wanted the hour to end so I could ask her what it was I had done. And then, all of a sudden, it hit me - boing! This had NOTHING to do with me. I felt a wave of relief, an internal shift like I had just had a chiropractic adjustment. I realized that I had made something that had nothing to do with me into something that was all about me.
I saw that I had been doing this all my life. When I was a kid, my mom was easily annoyed, and I always figured it was me bugging her. After growing up like that, I was forever making myself the cause of other people's pain. It was self-centered and rendered me incapable of compassion for others, because I'm no good to anybody else when it's all about me. And frankly, most things have nothing to do with me. It was very adolescent, really. I got it, suddenly and profoundly.”
― Jane Lynch, quote from Happy Accidents
“Many a times there is no perfect solution for a given problem. No solution is also a solution. Everything depends upon how you look at it. We make judgements on others depending upon what we think of them.”
― Sudha Murty, quote from How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories
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.