“As he looked out in the pitch dark beyond, a barn owl came into the floodlight, glid silently between the barns and was gone, seeming to leave some ghost of itself, some measureless whiteness in the air.”
― Cynan Jones, quote from The Dig
“A singular moth flutters in through the wind baffles to the naked bulb above the kettle, cuspid, a drifting piece of loose ash on the white filament, paper burnt up, caught in the rising current from some fire unseen, unfelt.”
― Cynan Jones, quote from The Dig
“He thinks of her sleeping now, the rest she needs, thinks of the warmth of her body, the nest-like thing she could be to his tiredness.”
― Cynan Jones, quote from The Dig
“And then he draws the lamb in one smooth strong stroke, and slaps and rakes its wet mosslike fur to make it breathe, feels the power of its fast heartbeat in the chicken-bone cage of its ribs, still wet in his hands from the grease of birth, all these things of life, from jissom to mucus slavered between thighs to the wet sack of birth and glistening oiled newborn thing—all of these things of life awatered.”
― Cynan Jones, quote from The Dig
“It is the ability of a person to bring a reaction in us that gives us a relationship with them, and for the time they do that they have a livingness to them.”
― Cynan Jones, quote from The Dig
“I wonder if she feels from me the thing I feel about her when I touch her. Not in sex, which he understood now was a different thing from everything else. I just mean when I touch her skin before we sleep and I understand all the things beneath it. Animals can't have that. They can't build their loved ones that way and feel right through their skin. That's never worn off, whatever else. He looked a where she slept. I can't imagine living without that.”
― Cynan Jones, quote from The Dig
“When you know about something it stops being a nightmare. When you know how to fight something, it stops being so threatening.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Blood of Elves
“إن العالم العربي، الذي ترونه من باريس، لم يبق منذ عهد محمد علي في مصر محنيا ولا جامدا. لقد انتفض محمد علي ضد الامبراطورية العثمانية والانجليز، تلته انتفاضة دروز سوريا في 1925، التي سحقها جنرالكم غورو، فحرب الجزائر، فالأنتفاضة المغربية وانتفاضة التونسيين التي أجلت كلأ من الفرنسيين والطليان الذين كانوا يتقاسمون خارطة الأمطار الشهيرة، فنهوض الجنرال قاسم بوجه الإنجليز في وشركة نفط العراق في 1958، ولم يدع عبد الناصر ولا حتى القذافي المملكة السنوسية سالمة. إن عالمنا كله انتفض ليتخلص من قمله، لكن لا رحب ولا فعل كان لهما مدى الثورة الفلسطينية”
― Jean Genet, quote from Prisoner of Love
“When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach, people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do, but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery) that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most immediately effective mode of influence. Our brains don’t just process and understand the actions and words of others but their feelings and intentions too, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions. On a mostly unconscious level, we can understand the minds of others not through any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping what the other is feeling. Think”
― Chris Voss, quote from Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
“As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Silent Corner
“I'm learning that my brain will invent catastrophic scenarios that bear absolutely no relationship to reality because, like Heloise, I am too much accustomed to misfortune to expect any happy turn.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
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.