Quotes from The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton ·  328 pages

Rating: (59K votes)


“I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“We all need people to tell us that we were the ones who had been deeply wronged.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn't have words, a song that almost doesn't have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn't a way to describe it. But the word love doesn't describe the half of it. It doesn't do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth



“It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“I have given up on speech with the Rev; there is no use explaining that you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. My trust, even down in that dark place I carry, is that some person will come running. And then finally the way through grief is grieving.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


“I knew that we were two humans, that's all, two humans walking around blindly in the night, looking for a warm hand.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth



“However, Mr. Darcy was the man I truly admired. I see him clearly. He is exceptionally tall, and his head is covered with black curly hair. He looks serious except when he smiles at you; it knocks you right straight across the room. His smile is that brilliant. He doesn't ever do anything to hurt girls. I longed for him to walk out of his book and reach for my hand.”
― Jane Hamilton, quote from The Book of Ruth


About the author

Jane Hamilton
Born place: in Rochester, Wisconsin, The United States
Born date July 13, 1957
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Ich wollte meine Augen öffnen, um Gideon ein letztes Mal anzusehen, aber ich schaffte es nicht.
"Ich liebe dich, Gwenny, bitte verlass mich nicht", sagte Gideon, und das war das letzte, was ich hörte, bevor ich von einem großen Nichts verschluckt wurde.”
― Kerstin Gier, quote from Emerald Green


“... everyone knows that ice cream is worth the trouble of being cold. Like all things virtuous, you have to suffer to gain the reward.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from The Rithmatist


“If your sins were blood, child, you would drown in a river of your own making.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night


“Not for the first time I felt myself confronted by the dizzying possibility that an entire episode in the story of mankind might have been forgotten. Indeed it seemed to me then, as I overlooked the mathematical city of the gods from the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, that our species could have been afflicted with some terrible amnesia and that the dark period so blithely and dismissively referred to as `prehistory' might turn out to conceal unimagined truths about our own past. What is prehistory, after all, if not a time forgotten--a time for which we have no records? What is prehistory if not an epoch of impenetrable obscurity through which our ancestors passed but about which we have no conscious remembrance? It was out of this epoch of obscurity, configured in mathematical code along astronomical and geodetic lines, that Teotihuacan with all its riddles was sent down to us. And out of that same epoch came the great Olmec sculptures, the inexplicably precise and accurate calendar the Mayans inherited from their predecessors, the inscrutable geoglyphs of Nazca, the mysterious Andean city of Tiahuanaco ... and so many other marvels of which we do not know the provenance. It is almost as though we have awakened into the daylight of history from a long and troubled sleep, and yet continue to be disturbed by the faint but haunting echoes of our dreams”
― Graham Hancock, quote from Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization


“Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead.”
― Laura Whitcomb, quote from A Certain Slant of Light


Interesting books

Fighting for Flight
(24.8K)
Fighting for Flight
by J.B. Salsbury
Forever Us
(11.8K)
Forever Us
by Sandi Lynn
Mister God, This is Anna
(4.5K)
Mister God, This is...
by Fynn
The Shadow Thieves
(5.7K)
The Shadow Thieves
by Anne Ursu
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
(110.6K)
Born a Crime: Storie...
by Trevor Noah
Old School
(9.7K)
Old School
by Tobias Wolff

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.