Richard Bach · 400 pages
Rating: (9.7K votes)
“I’m here not because I am supposed to be here, or because I’m trapped here, but because I’d rather be with you than anywhere else in the world.”
“That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.”
“That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way is winning.”
“Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.”
“Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you´re alive it isn't.”
“To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.”
“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.”
“There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.”
“The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.”
“Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.”
“I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
I don’t know where you are, but you’re living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I’m touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we’ll walk through and we’ll be full of a future and of a past and we’ll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can’t meet now, I don’t know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we’ll be caught in something so bright...and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet.”
“Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.”
“Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. It’s only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings.”
“How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.”
“From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.”
“Whatever enchants also guides and protects.”
“We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and love!”
“Has it ever happened, you’ve seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they’ve done, what they’ve given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you’re happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket...the actors I see on the screen, they’ll get twenty cents of this very dollar I’m paying now; they’ll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they’re delicious because we see ourselves in glory’s mirror.”
“Passionately obsessed by anything we love--an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels, rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love....”
“Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?”
“Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives.”
“What a delighted fascination it is, to stand aside and watch our dearest friend perform on stage without us.”
“If you bind too strongly to things and people, when they disappear, it will not go maybe even a part of ourselves?”
“Right at the beginning, before the pianist could get her wheels up and fly into that storm, she was hit with a con brio, which I figured meant she had to play either with brightness, with coldness, or with cheese.”
“O oposto de solidão não é companhia, é intimidade.”
“WE THINK, sometimes, there's not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile. We think sometimes that ours is an age past frontiers, past adventures. Destiny, it's way over the horizon; glowing shadows galloped past long ago, and gone. What a pleasure to be wrong.”
“Интересно, как себя чувствует тот, – сказала она, – кто покончил с собой, а потом понял, что его родная душа все еще живет на земле и ждет его?”
“Следуй неизменно за одной и той же звездой и обнаружишь, что не только сбился с пути, но и вовсе потерялся.”
“He's changing. Every day more remote, protected, distant. He builds fests now for the soulmate he hasn't found, bricking wall and maze and mountain fortress, dares her to find him at the hidden center of them all Here's an A in self-protection from the one in the world he might love and who might someday love him.”
“He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.”
“What men yearn for they often destroy.”
“And so the lion fell in love with the lamb . . . ,” he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word. “What a stupid lamb,” I sighed. “What a sick, masochistic lion.”
“They have a saying among them: 'When whores are few, a boy will do.”
“Langdon watched the phone plummet down and splash into the dark waters of the Nervión River. As it disappeared beneath the surface, he felt a pang of loss, staring back after it as the boat raced on.
“Robert,” Ambra whispered, “just remember the wise words of Disney’s Princess Elsa.”
Langdon turned. “I’m sorry?”
Ambra smiled softly. “Let it go.”
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.