“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
“Evil really needs to step up its game.”
― Lesley Livingston, quote from Darklight
“All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.”
― Jared Diamond, quote from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
“They crawled toward each other, and then with some unspoken understanding, both pushed off the floor with their hands and stood. Four parents and many bemused party guests watched as the two babies took their very first steps, crashed into each other, and fell to the floor laughing.”
― Wendy Mass, quote from 11 Birthdays
“Coyotes hunt in packs, and so do assholes.”
― Ellen Hopkins, quote from Tilt
“Which to you have?' Mel asked, blocking the entry with his body. 'Talent or issues?' I paused for a moment, thought about this. 'Both,' I said at last.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life
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.