“Life was good except for―oh, yes, there was always an except.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“Platitudes or otherwise, there were no words to ease the agony of living.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“Fancy feathers make peacocks, but you pluck them and see what's left.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“And, like the prodigal son, he had returned broken in body and also in mind to the house where he had been born, and he and his child had been welcomed with open arms.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“She's only got eight fingers but she's got them stuck in all kinds of pies, and she keeps her thumbs bare for testing new ones.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“Such love is bound to suffer, because it will wake up one day.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“Who wanted to live to a hundred and one? Who wanted to go on living at all at times?”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“Anyway, as they say, where there's life, there's hope. So let us eat.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“Try not to worry, for time is a great healer.' Such words were futile.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from The Mayor of Casterbridge
“Within a few generations, he had explained to Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in with the world. The world which was, for them, a web. Old stories told how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act—to Weave—was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.”
― China Miéville, quote from Perdido Street Station
“The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, quote from Memoirs of Hadrian
“Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies and were weeping at their own confusion.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Imajica
“But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, quote from The Complete Fairy Tales
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.