Quotes from The Christmas Train

David Baldacci ·  260 pages

Rating: (16.4K votes)


“All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It's my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they're going. For them it's the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“Two people can care for each other but not want the same things.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train



“Things might look bad now,but in matters of the heart you'd be surprised how quickly things change.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It’s been my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they’re going. For them it’s the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello. That’s why trains are so popular at Christmas. People get on to meet their country over the holidays. They’re looking for some friendship, a warm body to talk to. People don’t rush on a train, because that’s not what trains are for. How do you put a dollar value on that? What accounting line does that go on?”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It's often said that God works in mysterious ways. You have to really think about what He's trying to do. You can't be lazy and believe in God; He doesn't make it that easy. It takes spirit and faith and passion to really believe. Like most things worthwhile in life, you get back what you put into it. Only with faith, you get back a lot more.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants [...], which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“If you really love each other, you'd be surprised what you can accomplish.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train



“...love is like a good piece of wood: It just gets stronger and stronger as the years go by.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“Why are trains so popular at Christmas? People get on to meet their country over the holidays.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It had always bothered Tom that women thought they could win an argument with a man simply by appealing to his baser instincts, by holding out the mere possibility of award-winning carnal knowledge. It was the gender equivalent of a preemptive nuclear strike. He thought it unfair and, quite frankly, disrespectful of the entire male population.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“In his trip to Bethlehem Mark Twain had reported that all sects of Christians, except Protestants, had chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, he also observed that one group dared not trespass on the other’s territory, proving beyond doubt, he noted, that even the grave of the Savior couldn’t inspire peaceful worship among different beliefs.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“hob-gob of folks. And sometimes it’s”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train



“I’m not saying that riding the train will change your life, or that passenger rail will be a big moneymaker one day. But no matter how fast we feel we have to go, shouldn’t there be room for a train, where you can just sit back, take a breath, and be human for a little while? Just for a little while? Is that so bad?”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It’s not the beginning or the destination that counts. It’s the ride in between.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“Twain had found Palestine to be very tiny, writing that he “could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“For Tom the vision of Agnes Joe crammed inside the cockpit of a two-seater Cessna, her hammy fingers curled around the yoke, her enormous feet on the rudder pedals, wavered right on hallucinatory.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“пътищата Божии са неведоми. Постарай се да проумееш какво се опитва да направи той. Никой мързеливец не вярва в Господ, то това не е лесна работа. Нужен е силен дух и вяра, и желание да повярваш. Както и при всичко важно в живота, получаваш толкова, колкото и даваш. Само че когато имаш вяра, получаваш много повече.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train



“about three thousand miles separating them. She”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


“It had always bothered Tom that women thought they could win an argument with a man simply by appealing to his baser instincts, by holding out the mere possibility of award-winning carnal knowledge. It was the gender-battle equivalent of a preemptive nuclear strike. He thought it unfair and, quite frankly, disrespectful of the entire male population.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Christmas Train


About the author

David Baldacci
Born place: in Richmond, Virginia, The United States
Born date August 5, 1960
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“It was true that the Sweden Democrats had only received a tenth of a per cent of the vote in the last parliamentary election, but their rhetoric was based on fear, and Nombeko believed that fear had a bright future ahead of it; it always had.”
― Jonas Jonasson, quote from The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden


“Somewhere along the line we started misinterpreting the First Amendment and this idea of the freedom of speech the amendment grants us. We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.”
― Roxane Gay, quote from Bad Feminist


“but we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there?”
― Walker Percy, quote from Lancelot


“I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years.”
― Steve Martin, quote from Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life


“It amazes me still to this day how quickly the empire fell to pieces. One day
the people are kissing the ground upon which the Tsar’s shadow has fallen, the
next they are hacking apart his body. Nikolai merely put down his scepter and
walked away, and literally overnight a three-hundred-year old dynasty
evaporated — poof, gone! — with no one lifting a finger to save it. Ironic
that the Soviet Union collapsed just as easily, which proves it was no better,
that the cure, kommunizm, was in fact far worse than the disease itself. Now,
I can only hope, those days are over, and just maybe that’s true. After all,
it took nearly one hundred years for the insanity to fade from France after
their revolution.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar


Interesting books

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
(40.9K)
The Disreputable His...
by E. Lockhart
Embassytown
(22.1K)
Embassytown
by China Miéville
Robopocalypse
(31.8K)
Robopocalypse
by Daniel H. Wilson
The Complete Circle Series
(1.7K)
The Complete Circle...
by Ted Dekker
Austerlitz (Penguin Essentials)
(10.7K)
Austerlitz (Penguin...
by W.G. Sebald
The Madness Underneath
(14.2K)
The Madness Undernea...
by Maureen Johnson

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.