“When grief for fiction’s idle words More real than human life appears, Reflect that life itself’s a dream And do not mock the reader’s tears.”
― Cao Xueqin, quote from The Dreamer Wakes
“Better by far the destiny of plant or stone, bereft of knowledge and consciousness, but blessed at least with purity and peace of mind!”
― Cao Xueqin, quote from The Dreamer Wakes
“When grief for fiction’s idle words
More real than human life appears,
Reflect that life itself’s a dream
And do not mock the reader’s tears.”
― Cao Xueqin, quote from The Dreamer Wakes
“Better by far the destiny of plant or stone, bereft of knowledge and consciousness, but blessed at least with purity and peace of mind!’ These”
― Cao Xueqin, quote from The Dreamer Wakes
“In the courtyard before them grew a clump of bright green bamboo, while by the main doorway stood a row of dark pine-trees.”
― Cao Xueqin, quote from The Dreamer Wakes
“the only people who still have all the answers are those who have never been faced with the questions”
― Jojo Moyes, quote from The Ship of Brides
“What is music? What does it do to us? And why does it do to us what it does? People say that music has an uplifting effect on the soul: what rot! It isn’t true. It’s true that it has an effect, it has a terrible effect on me, at any rate, but it has nothing to do with any uplifting of the soul. Its effect on the soul is neither uplifting nor degrading — it merely irritates me.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from The Kreutzer Sonata
“If you think of someone's good qualities as the umeboshi in an onigiri it's as if their qualities are stuck to their back! Maybe the reason people get jealous of each other is because they can see so clearly the umeboshi on other people's backs.”
― Natsuki Takaya, quote from Fruits Basket, Vol. 2
“Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me.
But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from A Man Without a Country
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.