“The Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys while the cat by the fire is curled. Then away they floats in their eggshell boats, down the drains to their underground world.”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates
“Time,” he said solemnly, “is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curled around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant.”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates
“When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle.
Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill…But be willing to die for your choice.”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates
“His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building.”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates
“Jacky, who had read and admired Mary Wollstonecraft, and despised the fashion of fluttery helplessness in women, felt, to her own annoyance, close to fainting.”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates
“What’s a pandemonium?” whispered one of the men in the rear.
“It’s like a calliope,” answered a companion. “I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister’s boy play his organ.”
“His what?”
“His organ.”
“Lord. People pay money to see things like that?”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Anubis Gates
“Any custom is man-made and is therefore a finite attempt to describe an infinity of relationships. It follows as the night from day that any custom necessarily has its exceptions.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Methuselah's Children
“I want to chase the butterflies.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Wolfcry
“The American dream was not supposed to look like this, and when men went off the war, too often other men came in the night to the bedroom at the back of the long, narrow trailers. In fact, I had lived there and had gone off to war, and someone took of my place in the bed and took of my young wife. But that was few wars ago, and so much has happened since , that the only lingering bitterness left is that the bastard also took my dog.”
― Nelson DeMille, quote from The General's Daughter
“within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
“Getting over it doesn't mean forgetting it, it just means reducing the pain to a tolerable level, a level that doesn't destroy you. I know that right now the idea of getting over it is unimaginable. It's impossible, inconceivable, unthinkable. You don't want to get over it. Why should you? It's all you've got. You don't want kind words, you don't care what other people think or say, you don't want to know how they felt when they lost someone, They're no you, are there! They can't feel what you feel. The only thing you want is the things you can't have. It's gone. Never coming back. No one know how that feels. No one know what it's like to reach out and touch someone who isn't there and will never be there again. No one knows the unifiable emptiness. No one but you. You and me, love. We don't want anything. We want to die, but life won't let us. We're all it's got.”
― Kevin Brooks, quote from Lucas
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.
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