“What if I mess up?"
"Oh, you will. You'll mess up, you'll make mistakes, you'll break things. Some you'll be able to piece together, and others you'll lose. That's all a given. But there's only one thing you have to do for me."
"What's that?"
"Stay alive long enough to mess up again.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Lying is easy. But it's lonely."
"What do you mean?"
"When you lie to everyone about everything, what's left? What's true?"
"Nothing," I say.
"Exactly.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“It takes at least three assassination attempts to scare me off. And even then, if there are baked goods involved, I might come back.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“I’ve been thinking.”
“A dangerous pursuit.”
“Indeed.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“You're trying to block out every bit of noise. But people are made of noise, Mac. The world is full of noise. And finding quiet isn't about pushing everything out. It's just about pulling yourself in.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks.
"Required reading," I say.
"It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Because the only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Free caffeine and sugar, a recipe for making friends.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Lying is easy. But it’s lonely.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Everything is valuable, in its own way. Everything is full of history.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“He fought the men and he slayed the monsters and he bested the gods, and at last the hero, having conquered all, earned the thing that he wanted most. To go home.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“I am a horrible hollow kind of tired; all I want is quiet and rest.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“You know,” he says, “for someone who doesn’t like touching people, you keep finding ways to put your hands on me.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“It becomes a game, whispered and breathless.
"I hide who I am."
"I fight with the dead."
"I lie to the living."
"I am alone.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“The silliest things shatter you. A T-shirt discovered behind the washing machine. A toy that rolled under a cabinet in the garage, forgotten until someone drops something and goes to fetch it, and suddenly they’re on the concrete floor sobbing into a dusty baseball mitt.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“And then I get why Wes can’t stop smiling, even though it looks silly with his eyeliner and jet-black hair and hard jaw and scars. I am not alone. The words dance in my mind and in his eyes and against our rings and our keys, and now I smile too.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“We protect the past. And the way I see it, that means we need to understand it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“He manages a sad smile. “An omission is not the same thing as a lie, Miss Bishop. It’s a manipulation.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“What do schools do that for?” he grumbles. “What’s the point of summer if they give you homework?”
“Exactly!”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“We make a good team, Mackenzie Bishop.”
“We do.” We do, and that is the thing that tempers the heat beneath my skin, checks the flutter of girlish nerves. This is Wesley. My friend. My partner. Maybe one day my Crew. The fear of losing that keeps me in check.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Things only hurt more when you can see them.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“What a mess. Truths are messy and lies are messy, and I don’t care what Da said, it’s impossible to cut a person into pielike pieces, neat and tidy.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Everything about Wesley Ayers is messy. My three worlds are kept apart by walls and doors and locks, and yet here he is, tracking the Archive into my life like mud. I know what Da would say, I know, I know, I know. But the strange new overlap is scary and messy and welcome. I can be careful.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“More of a cookie person, myself. No offense to the other baked goods. I just like cookies.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“A death is traumatic. Vivid enough to mark any surface, to burn in like light on photo paper.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“The Archive makes us monsters. And then it breaks the ones who get too strong, and buries the ones who know too much.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“But once you know, you can’t go back. Not really. You can carve out someone’s memories, but they won’t be who they were before. They’ll just be full of holes. Given the choice, I’d rather learn to live with what I know.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“I am still frozen when he reaches out and brushes a finger over the three lines etched into the surface of my ring, then twists one of his own rings to reveal a cleaner but identical set of lines. The Archive’s insignia. When I don’t react—because no fluid lie came to me and now it’s too late—he closes the gap between us, close enough that I can almost hear the bass again, radiating off his skin. His thumb hooks under the cord around my throat and guides my key out from under my shirt. It glints in the twilight. Then he fetches the key from around his own neck.
“There,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re on the same page.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
Victoria Schwab
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“While their parents knew a different life and would never really feel at home again without it, their kids had never known anything else and would never really feel whole because of it. Over”
― quote from From Beirut to Jerusalem
“And so it was with the Broad Street well that the decision to remove the pump handle turned out to be more significant than the short-term effects of that decision [Cholera outbreak abated.] . . . .But the pump handle stands for more than that local redemption. It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and V. cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. . . . For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition.”
― Steven Johnson, quote from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
“Is it wrong to bring my new convictions to the set?” I asked myself. “Should I keep them wrapped up inside, letting business be business? After all, TV isn’t real. A sitcom is just a story. And the stories aren’t real. The characters aren’t real, either.” Now I sounded like a crazy person, talking to myself in my dressing room. I knew Mike Seaver wasn’t me and I wasn’t him, but viewers didn’t seem to know the difference. To them, the Seavers existed. If Mike took drugs, kids would assume it was okay to take drugs—all because Mike was cool and someone to follow. I didn’t want to blow it. That would be my nightmare. I desperately wanted to do the right thing in a no-win situation.”
― Kirk Cameron, quote from Still Growing: An Autobiography
“Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.”
― Tony Horwitz, quote from Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
“A small happiness can make a big sadness less sad.”
― Rachel Simon, quote from The Story of Beautiful Girl
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Last Light
Although of Course Y...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.
