“When a man has everything and does not know what more to do, he tries to teach his donkey to talk.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“What the sounds and smells do not divulge, gossip supplies. It spreads like wildfire in the neighborhood, where everyone is watching one another's morals.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“War was a central theme in maths books too. School books - because the Taliban printed books soley for boys - did not calcualte in apples and cakes, but in bullets and kalasnikovs. Something like this: 'little Omar has a kalasnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels does he kill with each bullet?”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“Anonymity became a release, the only place to which I could turn.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes’ notion of honor and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love, or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“They played a game of dare - who could get closest to the flames?”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“Do you know what is our problem? We know everything about our weapons, but we know nothing about how to use a telephone.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“There are many things one can think of when one needs someone to vent one’s wrath on.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“Los talibanes eran poco versados en la historia islámica o afgana, y tampoco les interesaba lo más mínimo.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul
“no matter how you look at the issue, prevention is a fundamentally preferable and more cost-effective way to promote health and longevity. Most people agree that we invest insufficiently in prevention, but they would also surmise that it is difficult to get young, healthy people to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of future illness. Consider smoking, which causes more preventable deaths than any major risk factor (the other big ones being physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol abuse). After prolonged legal battles, public health efforts to discourage smoking have managed to halve the percentage of Americans who smoke since the 1950s.19 Yet 20 percent of Americans still smoke, causing 443,000 premature deaths in 2011 at a direct cost of $96 billion per year. Likewise, most Americans know they should be physically active and eat a healthy diet, yet only 20 percent of Americans meet the government’s recommendations for physical activity, and fewer than 20 percent meet government dietary guidelines.20 There are many, diverse reasons we are bad at persuading, nudging, or otherwise encouraging people to use their bodies more as they evolved to be used (more on this later), but one contributing factor could be that we are still following in the footsteps of the marquis de Condorcet, waiting for the next promised breakthrough. Scared of death and hopeful about science, we spend billions of dollars trying to figure out how to regrow diseased organs, hunting for new drugs, and designing artifical body parts to replace the ones we wear out. I am in no way suggesting that we cease investing in these and other areas. Quite the contrary: let’s spend more! But let’s not do so in a way that promotes the pernicious feedback loop of just treating mismatch diseases rather than preventing them. In practical”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
“When we are in the grip of craving or fury, head-over-heals in love our recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system that has us in its grip.”
― Daniel Goleman, quote from Inteligência Emocional
“I do not know about magic, but words are powerful things indeed.”
― MarcyKate Connolly, quote from Monstrous
“A Bob Sacha le gusta trabajar de noche, cuando puede ver las cosas de manera distinta. Realizando un reportaje en Nuevo México para el artículo "Los primitivos astrónomos americanos", tomó una fotografía nocturna de la Casa Rinconada, una kiva anasazi en el Chaco Canyon. Sacha creyó que el mejor modo de plasmar la imagen de esta estructura circular -construida con la precisón del compás- era mediante una fotografía que mostrara los desplazamientos circulares de las estrellas sobre ella. Para conseguirla necesito una exposición de varias horas. Dispuso su cámara directamente en la puerta sur del edificio, y apuntó el objetivo ojo de pez hacia la puerta norte. Iluminó cada sección de los muros durante a penas un instante; para ello trabajó en noche sin luna, caminando al rededor del edificio y disparando el flash repetidas veces. Para iluminar los nichos encendió una vela en uno de ellos, contó hasta tres, y la apagó y avanzó hasta el siguiente e hizo lo mismo, con el obturador abierto todo el rato.
"Con largas exposiciones como ésta, no tienes ni idea de lo que realmente está pasando" dice Sacha ". No puedes mirar a través de la lente.”
― quote from National Geographic: The Photographs
“But for someone like me, who moved into an entirely different world when still quite young, it’s as if a deep gap divides my past and my present.”
― quote from A True Novel
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.