Quotes from The Age of Miracles

“How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“But the past is long, and the future is short.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't expect at all.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“But doesn't every precious era feel like fiction once it's gone? After a while, certain vestigial sayings are all that remain. Decades after the invention of the automobile, for instance, we continue to warn each other not to 'put the cart before the horse'. So, too, we do still have 'day'dreams and 'night'mares, and the early-morning clock hours are still known colloquially (if increasing mysteriously) as 'the crack of dawn'. Similarly, even as they grew apart, my parents never stopped calling each other 'sweetheart'.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kinds of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. THe chubby ones would likely always be chubby. THe beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes.
But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known--no law of physics can account for desire.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

“I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“precision and clarity where the police”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Beautiful Mystery

“The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge--what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner

“Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

“Until very recent times, few black Americans have regarded the African connection as a major theme in their lives. David Walker, in his 1829 Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World, said of America, "This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country". "No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward the colored people of this country", wrote the great Frederick Douglass, "than that which makes Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk, and denies us the rights of citizenship". When the freedmen after emancipation chose last names, they took not African names but the names of American heroes--Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Lincoln. "Centuries of residence, centuries of toil, centuries of suffering have made us American", a black high-school principal in Ohio said in 1874. "In language, in civilization, in fears, and in hopes we are Americans".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“عندما يكون المرء ضحية لأي نوع من التعسف، يمكنه أن يفعل أحد أمرين. يمكنه تعلم كيفية تحويل الألم إلى غاية وإحداث فرق في العالم أو يمكنه السماح له بإخماد النور في داخله. إن اختار الأمر الأخير، يكون قد ضحّى بأكثر من طفولته لآلهة الشعبية القساة.”
― Jodee Blanco, quote from Please Stop Laughing at Me... One Woman's Inspirational Story

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.