“She would tell me to never change for anyone, because the people you change for are the people who control you.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“The worst crime you can do to yourself is to forget why you chose the path you're on, but keep walking down it anyway.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“Ava’s Mum: – We are not like them, Ava. […] We have to be ready to fight, and when the enemy gets you, one day, you show them what I taught you. When they lock you in the darkness, become an arsonist. When they put you under house arrest, or defile your name in public, or make you live beneath the rules that will suffocate you, become an arsonist. When they put a pistol in your hand and make you shoot your best friend, and when they throw you in a death camp, when you see everyone around you get sick from the poison they’re feeding them, light a fire that will destroy them. A fire they won’t forget the next time they try to do it to someone else.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“Georg Winkler: – You take a lesson from Ava, […]. You want to know how to navigate life? Don’t live and die by the beliefs you had when you were young. Everything changes, that’s what you learn when you’ve lived as long as I have. The worst crime you can do to yourself is to forget why you chose the path you’re on, but keep walking down it anyway.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“Molly: – You killed people. […] You made them disappear, and didn’t even let the families hold funerals.
Heinrich Werner: – That was the machine, not me.
Molly: – You were part of the machine.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“Ava: – Gentle. I was never taught to be gentle. When I sang, I did so loudly. When I played sports, I had to win, otherwise what was the point? My mother would never tell me to quiet myself for a boy. She would tell me to never change for anyone, because the people you change for are the people who control you.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“Grief is a kind of war, I think now. Loss is like a bullet. A person can only take so much.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
Stephanie Oakes
Born place: Spokane, WA, The United States
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“Suppose that Art is a real hothead. If Bud rats on him, Art will be so enraged that nothing will stop him from killing Bud, even if he has to wait ten years, and even if he has to chase Bud to the ends of the earth. If Bud knows of Art’s vengeful nature, then Bud has a strong incentive not to rat on him. Thus, by being vengeful, and being known for it, Art can be his own robotic hit man, incentivizing others to cooperate with him through his high-flying, credible threats. Of course, being vengeful can be very costly. Art could lose everything if he does, in fact, devote his life to exacting vengeance on Bud. Still, if all goes well, Art will never actually need to go after Bud, because people like Bud won’t dare cross him. Thus, the emotions that fuel vengeful behaviors are, or can be, a kind of rational irrationality. They serve our interests by publicly committing us to doing things that are not in our own interest. We”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
“Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
“I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if from a dream, which made the playback of my father and other men abusing me seem I even less real, fantasies conjured up from my imagination, not my memory. Perhaps somebody else’s memory. I didn’t think of myself as having mental-health problems. You don’t at sixteen. I thought of myself as being special, highly strung, moody.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“La belleza no es una idea absoluta y solo puede apreciarse por contraste.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
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A Lancaster County C...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.
