Quotes from The Dissident

“... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident

“He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident

“People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident

“Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. Then inevitably, one side came crashing down.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident

“But I have never been sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love. Perhaps real love is too boring to talk about. Heartbreak is so much easier to understand that I think we might sometimes employ it as an understudy, a stand-in for the real thing.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident

“Phil doesn't say yes, but he doesn't really say no. He's willing to ruin a person's life in order to keep her from being angry at him.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident

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Popular quotes

“To be completely helpless in the face of life―powerless to do a single thing―that's what I'd always feared more than anything. It was like I'd been keeping all the edges of my life neat and clean, pretending the neatness was all that mattered, pretending life could somehow be controlled.”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from Full Tilt

“Senza costrizione non si potrebbe fondare nessun insediamento. [...]”
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“Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.”
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― John Eldredge, quote from Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul

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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.