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

“Step follows step,
Hope follows Courage,
Set your face towards danger,
Set your heart on victory.”
― Gail Carson Levine, quote from The Two Princesses of Bamarre

“I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling peacefully along, and all the time Life's waiting around the corner to fetch you one. You can't tell when you may be going to get it. It's all dashed puzzling. Here was poor old George, as well-meaning a fellow as every stepped, getting swatted all over the ring by the hand of Fate. Why? That's what I asked myself. Just Life, don't you know. That's all there was about it.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from My Man Jeeves

“Dad on Child-rearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You'll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollboth outside Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret Paradise Lost, no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far out in front of them all. For them, you will be a speck somewhere above the horizon. And thus, when you're ultimately set loose upon the world..." He shrugged, his smile lazy as an old dog. "I suspect you'll have no choice but to go down in history.”
― Marisha Pessl, quote from Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“She is, Althea thought uneasily, what I pretend to be: a woman who does not let her sex deter her from living as she pleases.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Ship of Destiny

“Because passion, like crime, does not like everyday order and well-being and every slight undoing of the bourgeois system, every confusion and infestation of the world is welcome to it, because it can unconditionally expect to find its advantage in it.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice

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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.