Quotes from The Almost Moon

“The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density? ”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Mi madre era eterna como la luna. Viva o muerta, la madre o la ausencia de la madre siempre determina la vida de una persona".”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Fucking bastards are simple by nature.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“So much in life is about almosts, not quites.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“There are secret rooms inside us,” I had said to my therapist.
“A relatively benign construct,” he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

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Popular quotes

“Per i prossimo dieci anni la tua vita sarà orribile, avrai grandi problemi e niente ti andrà bene", dice l'indovino. "E poi?", chiede ansioso il cliente. "Poi? Poi ci farai l'abitudine!”
― Tiziano Terzani, quote from A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

“Coffee, if not strong enough to wake a man from a coma, is not truly coffee.”
― Roseanna M. White, quote from The Lost Heiress

“Someday you’re going to wake up and leave your house, Magnet, and you’re going to discover the world. Someday you’re going to see the whole wide world, Maggie May, and on that day, when you step outside and breathe in your first breath, I want you to find me. No matter what, find me, because I’m going to be the one to show it to you. I’m going to help you cross things off your to-do list. I’m gonna show you the whole wide world. Just”
― Brittainy C. Cherry, quote from The Silent Waters

“Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.”
― Barry López, quote from Arctic Dreams

“Pappa, just stop and think for a minute. Is this really what you want?”
“Hmm. What I want?” (he pronounces it ‘vat I vant’). “Of course to father such a child would be not straightforward. Technically it may be possible…”
The thought of my father having sex with this woman makes my stomach turn.
“…Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina…”
He is lingering over this procreation scenario too much for my taste. Looking at it from different angles. Trying it for size, as it were. “…what do you think?”
― Marina Lewycka, quote from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

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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.