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

“I bet whatever you keep hidden in the pages of those books is absolutely beautiful, Aly .” He swallowed, diverting his gaze to the far wall before he dropped it to meet mine. A tender palm came to rest on the side of my face. He caressed his thumb over the apple of my cheek. “How could it not be? Look at you . . . you have to be the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”
Pain reverberated in his words. Still they wrapped around me like the warmest embrace.
My fingers ventured to his chest, twisting in his shirt. The strong throb of his pulse thundered under them. “Everything I love is in the pages of those books, Jared.”
― A.L. Jackson, quote from Come to Me Quietly


“It took me a while to understand that when you don’t like someone, nothing they can say or do will ever seem right. Something as harmless as giving a kid a cookie becomes something aggressive, a challenge to their authority.”
― Alexandra Bracken, quote from Sparks Rise


“Remove,’ I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling


“Small things can lead to huge changes, and if those changes end up being obstacles, try to learn from them instead of letting them crush you. There were many”
― Joey Graceffa, quote from In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World


“I suspect almost every day that I’m living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don’t like myself. What’s more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we’ve got and, simplistic as it may seem, it’s a person’s duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We’re all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung


Interesting books

The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm
(3.9K)
The Shattering: Prel...
by Christie Golden
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
(6.2K)
Descartes' Error: Em...
by António R. Damásio
Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300
(263)
Sabrina Fair
(125)
Sabrina Fair
by Samuel Taylor
The Shockwave Rider
(3.2K)
The Shockwave Rider
by John Brunner
The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World
(1.2K)
The Biggest Secret:...
by David Icke

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.