Molly Harper · 336 pages
Rating: (8.3K votes)
“You're right, it was a bad phone," I said, lifting an eyebrow. "Look at it, lying there, all superior. The phone had it coming.”
“Well, now I felt horrible. I'd marred perfectly good ass cheeks for no reason. It was as if I'd sneezed on the Mona Lisa.”
“She had a knack for relieving the tension in a room by pretending my rudeness away with cooking. Many, many chickens had given up their lives to cover my conversationalist shortcomings.”
“I don't care what tomorrow brings, as long as I have you.”
“I was shameless in my supermarket-shelf mass-market taste. I loved King, Evanovich, Grisham and Brown. I won't lie; the oficial-looking filing cabinet in the corner is actually stuffed full of my paperbacks.”
“He ground into me. His denim covered OHMYGOD pressing into my hot uncovered.... lady business. I really had to start using grown up words.”
“Why would anyone on the crew put on a red shirt? Honestly, it’s like they’re standing in front of their closet, and they’re thinking, ‘Yellow? Blue? Nah, today’s a good day to die.”
“Go on, you've claimed your thirty pieces of silver, go do something crazy like put gas in that penis replacement you call transportation.”
“How many family conversations are going to be interrupted by me telling you, no, you can't kill someone and make it look like an accident?”
“We should have never encouraged you to speak.”
“Yeah, but when has telling someone to do what makes them happy ever resulted in a good decision? Remember when we told cousin Todd to do what made him happy and he came home with recently augmented boobs?”
“Nick: I love you. Who was wrong?
Maggie: I was wrong.
Nick: Who was right?
Maggie: Don't push it.”
“Nick: I'm not leaving you. I don't care what you try to do to push me away. I don't care what comes along. I'm here. If you think I'm going to back down now, you're crazy.
Maggie: So you're going to love me out of spite?
Nick: Yes.
Maggie: Ah, spite, the stuff of fairy tales.”
“You're pulling a Lassie on me, aren't you?”
“[Dad] once told Cooper that the trick to a happy life was to find the person you can't breathe without and marry her.”
“Ah, spite, the stuff of fairy tales.”
“Never is okay, you know,” he murmurs.
I draw back a bit. “What?”
“You said ‘not yet.’” He looks at me. “I’ll leave it up to you. But ‘never’ is okay, too, Jules. Never is always okay.”
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
“But aesthetic value does not rise from the work's apparent ability to predict a future: we do not admire Cézanne because of the Cubists drew on him. Value rises from deep in the work itself - from its vitality, its intrinsic qualities, its address to the senses, intellect, and imagination; from the uses it makes of the concrete body of tradition. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. Not even the greatest doctor in Bologna in the 17th century knew as much a bout the human body as today's third-year medical student. But nobody alive today can draw as well as Rembrandt or Goya.”
“Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare’s life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier’s “discoveries” had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859.”
“A most deplorable sight," she said, folding her arms across her chest. "Someone who has lost everything. You know, minstrel, it is interesting. Once, I thought it was impossible to lose everything, that something always remains. Always. Even in times of contempt, when naivety is capable of backfiring in the cruellest way, one cannot lose everything. But he... he lost several pints of blood, the ability to walk properly, partial use of his left hand, his witcher's sword, the woman he loves, the daughter he had gained by a miracle, his faith... Well, I thought, he must have been left with something. But I was wrong. He has nothing now. Not even a razor."
Dandelion remained silent. The dryad did not move.
"I asked if you had a hand in this," she began a moment later. "But I think there was no need. It's obvious you had a hand in it. It's obvious you are his friend. And if someone has friends, and he loses everything in spite of that, it's obvious the friends are to blame. For what they did, or for what they didn't do.”
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.