“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
“Remember: blonde, brunette, and redhead are not personality types.”
― Howard Mittelmark, quote from How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide
“Destruction is easy. But creating something that lasts is a challenge.”
― Christie Golden, quote from The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm
“The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ...
In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.
The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.”
― António R. Damásio, quote from Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
“In his own words Adorno said his music was Stalinist or Fascist and he used “big concepts to see if they sound right and fit the data.” In these words can be found the key to why he was engaged by Tavistock to write music based on the 12-atonal system of music that “sounded right” and he then “fit the data” namely, he wrote the lyrics to match, so that what emerged was an 18 album set he wrote for the Beatles. Underlying the whole Beatle music concept was Adorno’s long held belief that capitalism was evil, because it “fed the people with products of a culture industry to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic.” His “Beatle 12-atonal music” would throw a wrench into the works of the world’s biggest capitalist state, the United States of America.”
― quote from Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300
“(I) want to do everything and see everything, sense everything and feel everything and taste everything; to know that life is an enormous experience and must be used. To be in the world, and of the world, and never to stand aside and watch.”
― Samuel Taylor, quote from Sabrina Fair
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.