Quotes from The Before Now and After Then

Peter Monn ·  304 pages

Rating: (410 votes)


“I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. Sometimes pain likes to be alone.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“Maybe, just maybe, the perfection of the world was found in the imperfection.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“That's the thing about parents. They ask what you think, but they don't really care, or at least they don't care enough to let it affect the outcome.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“Sometimes it was easier to stay and suffer for the short term than to have a permanent scar reminding you of the past.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“He had never seemed breakable before, but in that moment, he was entirely fragile, and there was something beautiful in his sadness; something raw.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then



“And then I would cry, because even though boys don’t cry, I did.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“I think it’s funny how people say what dead people would want, as if they would know.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“Parents always thought if they could get on your level then that allowed them secret passage into your world when in reality, they were just manipulating you the whole time.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


“Eventually, the Pat's of this world forgot about you and moved on to someone else. The worst part was that deep down inside, you knew that there was a truth to everything they said. And even if that truth wasn't bad or good, they still owned part of it. They owned a piece of you.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then


About the author

Popular quotes

“What do you dream about?” she asks me.
“Finding someone,” I say immediately. “Someone who I can trust, someone who makes me complete.” I bite my lip, and my face flushes hot. “That's stupid, I know. It's just that I never had anybody, really. Not someone who I chose, or who chose me.”
Lark rolls toward me, propping herself up on her elbow. She looks into my eyes and says solemnly, “I chose you.”
Then, slowly, she bends until her lips touch mine. Her lilac hair tumbles over us, and though it I can see the stars shining. Oh Earth, they're spinning! They're dancing…”
― Joey Graceffa, quote from Children of Eden


“We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the outer edge of one of the spiral arms.”
― Stephen Hawking, quote from The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe


“This book will prove the following ten facts:
1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.
2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.
3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight.
5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast.
6. An Englishman's home is his castle.
7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
8. One black eye deserves another.
9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.
10. It pays to increase your word power.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, quote from Archer's Goon


“Little things. The thought of losing them makes them unbearably dear ... I only think of the sweetness. Simple things. The quarter moon, the taste of an orange. The smell of the pages of a new book.”
― Patricia Gaffney, quote from The Saving Graces


“Four years ago, when I started writing this book, my hypothesis was mostly based on a hunch. I had been doing some research on university campuses and had begun to notice that many students I was meeting were preoccupied with the inroads private corporations were making into their public schools. They were angry that ads were creeping into cafeterias, common rooms, even washrooms; that their schools were diving into exclusive distribution deals with soft-drink companies and computer manufacturers, and that academic studies were starting to look more and more like market research.”
― Naomi Klein, quote from No Logo


Interesting books

Storm Glass
(21.1K)
Storm Glass
by Maria V. Snyder
The Devil All the Time
(12.1K)
The Devil All the Ti...
by Donald Ray Pollock
The Crown Conspiracy
(14.6K)
The Crown Conspiracy
by Michael J. Sullivan
The Sea, the Sea
(13.1K)
The Sea, the Sea
by Iris Murdoch
The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
(8.9K)
The Ballad of the Sa...
by Carson McCullers
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
(31.7K)
Memoirs of a Teenage...
by Gabrielle Zevin

About BookQuoters

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.