“I do all this alone, everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it's my head I'm locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.”
― Alex Garland, quote from The Coma
“The dilapidation was not a memory but a representation of a poorly remembered past.”
― Alex Garland, quote from The Coma
“I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.”
― Alex Garland, quote from The Coma
“So: I knew dream life. In fact, in a way, I was actually comfortable with it. Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world---just no more confusing than any other.”
― Alex Garland, quote from The Coma
“I guess it was easier to hide her sadness behind the written word than to disguise the emptiness in her voice.”
― John Marrs, quote from The Good Samaritan
“All music is the blues. All of it.”
― George Carlin, quote from Napalm & Silly Putty
“Wishing I had a towel, I used my fingers to wipe the raindrops off my face. My wet face that had been partially protected by the brim of his cap. Which would have worked if the rain fell straight down. This had been slashing across.
“Oh, no.”
“What?” Jason said.
“Turn on the light.”
He did. I lowered the sun visor, looked at my reflection in the mirror, groaned, and slapped the visor back into place. “Turn the light off.”
“What’s wrong?”
I didn’t look at him, didn’t want him to see. “The makeup ran.”
Not as badly as I’d expected, but I had dark smudges beneath my eyes and my bruising was more visible.
“So what?”
I leaned my head back. “I look worse than I did the night you met me.”
“I thought you looked fine.”
I rolled my head to the side, so I could see him. Hoping the shadows made it so he couldn’t see me. “What are you talking about? I looked like a Cirque de Soleil performer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The black dots around my eyes?”
He shook his head. “I’m lost.”
“You were staring--”
“Oh, yeah.” He gazed through the windshield. “Sorry about that. I’ve just never seen eyes as green as yours. I was trying to figure out if you wore contacts.”
“You were looking at my eyes?”
“Yeah.”
“Not the makeup.”
He turned his attention back to me. “I didn’t realize you were wearing any. That night, anyway. Tonight it’s pretty obvious.”
“Oh.” Didn’t I feel silly? “I thought--” I shook my head. “Never mind.” On second thought…
“You don’t like all the makeup?”
“I just don’t think you need it. I mean, you look pretty without it.”
Oh, really? That was totally unexpected.
He started tapping the steering wheel like he was listening to a rock concert, or suddenly embarrassed, maybe wishing someone would shut him up. “Sorry I don’t have a towel in the car.”
Subject change. He was embarrassed. How cute was that?”
― Rachel Hawthorne, quote from The Boyfriend League
“the yidam is the expression of one’s own basic nature, visualized as a divine form in order to relate with it and express its full potentiality.”
― Padmasambhava, quote from Tibetan Book of the Dead
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.