“The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all. And I had noticed him, as he had me. God help us.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“If you love a man for his honesty, you cannot become angry when he shows it.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“It was so cold. In the monastery. Sometimes the wind came from the sea with ice in it... It could freeze the skin off your face. Once the snow was so deep we couldn't get out of the doors to the woodshed. A monk jumped from a window. He sank into a drift and took a long time to get up. That night, they made me sleep next to the stove. I was small, thin, like a piece of birch bark. But then the Stove went out.
Father Bernard took me into his cell... It was he who first gave me chalk and paper. He was so old his eyes his eyes looked as if he was crying. But he was never sad. In winter he had fewer blankets than the others. He said he didn't need them because God warmed him.
(...)
But even Father Bernard was cold that night. He laid me down on the bed next to him, wrapped me in an animal skin, then in his own arms. He told me stories about Jesus. How His love could wake the dead and how with Him in one's heart one could heat the world... When I woke it was light. The snow had stopped. I was warm. But he was cold. I gave him the skin but his body was stiff. I didn't know what to do. I got out a piece of paper from his chest under the bed and drew him, lying there. His face had a smile on it. I knew that God had been there when he died. That now He was in me, and because of Father Bernard I would be warm forever.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“And, such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for me.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“There is more glory in peace than in war,”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all.”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
“Either you’re standing under your haloes, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which one they prefer. The best you can do is choose when you change your costume”
― Sarah Dunant, quote from The Birth of Venus
Sarah Dunant
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date August 8, 1950
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“It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,' he answered. 'I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge. Therein lies the secret. The better the porridge, the better the painting, but you cannot make good porridge from bad buckwheat. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing.'
He took blue and red and placed them next to each other, painting the eyes of an angel. And I saw the angel's eyes turn violet.
'I work with something like a dictionary of colors,' Nikon added, 'and from it the observer composes sentences and books, in other words, images. You could do the same with writing. Why shouldn't someone create a dictionary of words that make up one book and let the reader himself assemble the words into a whole?”
― Milorad Pavić, quote from Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words
“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
“These failures are inevitable because the world is complex and we will never fully understand its subtleties. The model, as social scientists often remind us, is not the system. Failure is thus a signpost. It reveals a feature of our world we hadn’t grasped fully and offers vital clues about how to update our models, strategies, and behaviors. From this perspective, the question often asked in the aftermath of an adverse event, namely, “Can we afford the time to investigate failure?,” seems the wrong way around. The real question is, “Can we afford not to?”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“We depend on neither man nor beast to get us where we need to go. If you rely on your own two good legs, then they won’t let you down.”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from The Spook's Apprentice
“I wore you on me at all times
Like I now carry my pen.
Unlike your own opinion my
Belongings must have a function.
You bled through the ink of my lines and
To be my subject nursed your thirst.
Was it my fault, or your own, that you forgot
—I do not deal in tender verse.”
― Mie Hansson, quote from Where Pain Thrives
The Guns of August
The Grim Grotto
Erak's Ransom
Austenland
The Witch of Portobe...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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