“And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“If one has a good reputation and trusted, the rules can be bent to accommodate.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“His arrival detonated two sheepdogs that began barking even before they emerged at a dead run from behind the garage. ”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“The lying started in the eighth grade. Possibly it had begun earlier, and I simply hadn’t noticed.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“If you suspect a problem, there is a problem. Don’t let them get away with even the very first lie. Be vigilant.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony
“... my aim in writing The Watch That Ends the Night was not to present history. My aim was to present humanity. The people represented in this book lived and breathed and loved. They were as real as you or me. They could have been any one of us.”
― Allan Wolf, quote from The Watch That Ends the Night
“Don't pretend you don't like it when I treat you as a lady.”
“Maybe I don't.”
Despite that, he still opened the car door for me, with his lips curving up into a careless grin. “Girls always do that,” he said, “—pretend they think you're taking their independence from them if you open a door. But that's not the case.”
“Well, what is the case?” I sat down on the front seat—leaving my feet on the driveway.
“Simply that we're demonstrating good-breeding; showing the girl we're worthy and capable of taking care of her—that we're polite, considerate and nurturing.”
I folded my arms. “Women don't need nurturing—or to be taken care of. We can fend for ourselves. We're equal to men, you know.”
― Angela M. Hudson, quote from Tears of the Broken
“The mere idea that you are not in a place for the rest of your life gives you an awfully unstable feeling. That's why trial marriages would never work. You've got to feel you're in a thing irrevocably and forever in order to buckle down and really put your whole mind into making it a success.”
― Jean Webster, quote from Dear Enemy
“...chicks are naturally attracted to the scent of badass”
― Trish Doller, quote from Something like Normal
“By 1948 I was safe on my feet and able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to feel I should go crazy if I didn’t get away from it to England again, where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago. What I didn’t realise then was that it wasn’t England I was really fretting for. It was my lost youth.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
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.