“Shooting stars are not really stars at all but meteorites, burning their way through our atmosphere, sometimes landing in the oceans and in the middle of farms...you could make wishes on them if you like, but they are really just pieces of rock falling down from the sky, and they could land on your head and kill you just as you look up to make a wish. Really, they're just rocks. They don't care about your wishes at all.”
― Laura Moriarty, quote from The Center of Everything
“I know that sometimes when you are really worried about something, it ends up not being nearly as bad as you think it will be, and you get to be relieved that you were just being silly, worrying so much over nothing. But sometimes it is just the opposite. It can happen that whatever you are worried about will be even worse than you could have possibly imagined, and you find that you were right to be worried, and even that, maybe, you weren't worried enough.”
― Laura Moriarty, quote from The Center of Everything
“Someone needs to give the Pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.”
― Laura Moriarty, quote from The Center of Everything
“It's like swimming, underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes. hold my breath, and keep kicking.”
― Laura Moriarty, quote from The Center of Everything
“This is how it is now. This is my life.”
― Laura Moriarty, quote from The Center of Everything
Laura Moriarty
Born place: in Honolulu, Hawaii, The United States
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“This was very bitter to Gerald, who had never known what boredom was, who had gone from activity to activity, never at a loss. Now, gradually, everything seemed to be stopping in him. He did not want any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no-one for the moment to drink with. Nor was there a woman. And he knew Birkin was out. So there was nothing to do but to bear the stress of his own emptiness.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from Women in Love
“Howard had a pine display case, fastened by fake leather straps and stained to look like walnut. Inside, on fake velvet, were cheap gold-plated earrings and pendants of semiprecious stones. He opened this case for haggard country wives when their husbands were off chopping trees or reaping the back acres. He showed them the same half-dozen pieces every year the last time he came around, when he thought, This is the season - preserving done, woodpile high, north wind up and getting cold, night showing up earlier every day, dark and ice pressing down from the north, down on the raw wood of their cabins, on the rough-cut rafters that sag and sometimes snap from the weight of the dark and the ice, burying families in their sleep, the dark and the ice and sometimes the red in the sky through trees: the heartbreak of a cold sun. He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.”
― Paul Harding, quote from Tinkers
“Anything we do, talí, we do with honor.”
― quote from Stalking Darkness
“Article Five: If you have no reason or ability to accomplish anything, then just practice the art of becoming.”
― Elif Shafak, quote from The Bastard of Istanbul
“In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases of the moon and Venus affect daily life. To measure and predict these portents requires careful sky watching and a calendar. Strikingly, Mesoamerican societies developed three calendars: a 365-day secular calendar like the contemporary calendar; a 260-day sacred calendar that was like no other calendar on earth; and the equally unique Long Count, a one-by-one tally of the days since a fixed starting point thousands of years ago.”
― Charles C. Mann, quote from 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
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The Asylum for Waywa...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.
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