Quotes from The Bookshop

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.'
'I don't see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can't be called a success.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Courage and endurance are useless if they are never tested.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“She ought to go down to the beach. It was Thursday, early closing, and it seemed ungrateful to live so close to the sea and never look at it for weeks on end.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“—No debo preocuparme —dijo ella—. Mientras hay vida, hay esperanza.
—Qué idea tan terrible”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“La valentía de ella, al fin y al cabo, no era otra cosa que su determinación por sobrevivir.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Um bom livro é o precioso sangue vital de um espírito mestre, embalsamado e entesourado de propósito para uma vida para lá da vida.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“It was defeat, but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Those who made it {to her shop} were somewhat unwilling to part with...what Florence really wanted, unless she would also take a pile of novels which had the air, in their slightly worn jackets, of women on whom no one had ever made any demand.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“La antigüedad no es lo mismo que el interés histórico —dijo—. De lo contrario, nosotros dos seríamos más interesantes de lo que somos.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“No tengo nada contra la formación profesional, pero entrar ahí quiere decir lo siguiente: ¿qué posibilidades tendrá en la vida de conocer a un hombre con educación y de casarse con él? Nunca podrá aspirar a nada más que a un obrero o, incluso, a uno en paro.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Últimamente se había empezado a preguntar si no tendría la obligación de demostrarse a sí misma, y posiblemente a los demás, que ella existía por derecho propio.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“La fuerza de voluntad es inútil si no se va a algún lado”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Un buen libro es la preciosa savia del alma de un maestro, embalsamada y atesorada intencionadamente para una vida más allá de la vida.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Quizá su batalla para establecerse en Old House había terminado, o quizá se equivocaba al pensar que había encontrado su lugar o que podría encontrarlo alguna vez.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Hojear libros es parte de la tradición de una librería —le dijo Florence—. Debes dejar que se queden y toquen los libros.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Igual que seguía considerando que la gravedad es una fuerza que atrae las cosas hacia sí, y no una simple cuestión que se encarga de las que menos resistencia opongan a ella, estaba segura de que el carácter era una lucha entre las buenas y las malas intenciones.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“A los diez años y medio tenía la certeza, quizá por última vez en su vida, de cómo había que hacer las cosas exactamente”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Ninguna de las dos estaba preparada para reconocer que le gustaría proteger a la otra. Habría sido como permitir que el miedo entrara en la habitación.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“Es un buen libro y, por lo tanto, debería intentar vendérselo a los habitantes de Hardborough. No lo entenderán, pero será mejor así. Entender las cosas hace que la mente se vuelva perezosa.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“IN 1959 Florence Green occasionally passed a night when she was not absolutely sure whether she had slept or not.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

“She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop

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Popular quotes

“Jaenelle woke up in a similar mood,” Lucivar said mildly. “Must have been an interesting night.” “Nothing happened,” Daemon growled as he swiped his hair back. “Nothing physical,” Lucivar said. “But I’ve danced with the Sadist enough times to recognize him when I see him.” Daemon just waited. Lucivar’s lips curled into that lazy, arrogant smile. “Welcome to Kaeleer, brother,” he said softly. “It’s good to have you back.” He paused at the bathroom door. “I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. That and a hot shower ought to wake you up enough.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Queen of the Darkness

“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was, and always will be yours. If it never returns, it was never yours to begin with.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Unleash the Night

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Lathe of Heaven

“Don't go gittin faintified on me.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, quote from The Yearling

“How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work…We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.
No.”
― Tana French, quote from In the Woods

Interesting books

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.