“I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured.
But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer. If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I had taken a partner once before-but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“You can die anyplace. They’ve never managed to regulate that.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park—I”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“-Brindemos por la raza femenina, Pet… ¡Encuéntralas y olvídalas!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“But I gathered that it was classified...by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.” “Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Брать взаймы – всё равно что плыть с камнем на шее.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Мудрый человек должен быть в любое время готов остаться ни с чем.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
“Belle was not only a perfect secretary and office manager, she also had personal specs which would have delighted Praxiteles and a fragrance which affected me the way catnip does Pete.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Door Into Summer
Robert A. Heinlein
Born place: in Butler, MO, The United States
Born date July 7, 1907
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“The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered.”
― Flann O'Brien, quote from The Third Policeman
“All men are more concerned to recover what they lose than to acquire what they lack.”
― Aesop, quote from Aesop's Fables
“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
― Joe Haldeman, quote from The Forever War
“Perhaps—the insight came suddenly—perhaps love existed in its truest, deepest form when one partner saw into the soul of the other and never shrank from what was discovered there.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“Loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favor, but they quite clearly weren't. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn't worth the risk?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from About a Boy
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Story of a Soul: The...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.
