“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
“You were supposed to empathize with your friend's problem, but they were, after all, your friend's problems...”
― Christopher Moore, quote from The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
“There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer. In the tale there would be strands of ivy clustering the walls, and barring the entrance and the house itself would have slept for a thousand years.”
― Daphne du Maurier, quote from Jamaica Inn
“Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Tombs of Atuan
“It’s funny how the same thing a man loves, is the same thing that he hates. What makes me stand out as a woman is that I have nonnegotiable principles, strength, and faith in my people. From the time that we shared you seemed to love that, admire it, even. Now you hate it because my ways have isolated you. The truth is, you’ve isolated yourself.”
― Sister Souljah, quote from The Coldest Winter Ever
“Does a leaf, when it falls from the tree in winter, feel defeated by the cold?
The tree says to the leaf:
"That’s the cycle of life. You may think you’re going to die, but you live on in me. It’s thanks to you that I’m alive, because I can breathe. It’s also thanks to you that I have felt loved, because I was able to give shade to the weary traveller. Your sap is in my sap; we are one thing.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Manuscript Found in Accra
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.