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

“Two men, one fairly dragging the other along, suddenly entered the clearing and, their eyes trained behind them, ran headlong into the owl’s creation and knocked it, every maple branch and every twig of dogwood, to the ground in a splintering crash. The owl fell backward, devastated.”
― Colin Meloy, quote from Wildwood Imperium


“This emptiness inside of me here,” he placed my hand on his chest, “means I love you. When you’re not here, I can’t focus. It’s too loud . . . But my heartbeat does this when you’re close.”
― Amber L. Johnson, quote from Puddle Jumping


“The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems


“Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could life the lid and precious gems would spill over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy- an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.”
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“Sometimes, she told herself, life was a series of obstacles that just had to be negotiated, possibly through sheer act of will. She stared out at the muddy blue of the endless sea, gulped in the air, lifted her chin, and decided that she could survive this. She could survive most things. It was nobody’s right to be happy, after all.”
― Jojo Moyes, quote from The One Plus One


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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.

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