“You made friends with a prickler?" Hawk says, standing just inside the secret opening, apparently having come inside during my story, "I'm confused," Adele says. "At first I thought pricklers were some kind of plant, but are they an animal? Or some weird kind of person?"
"We ate your friend" Tristan says, his handsome face screwed up even more.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“This girl's out of her mind, about two pebbles short of a cave-in.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“A simple touch, but it speaks so much to me. It’s the way I would touch Circ—the way he would touch me. More’n a touch—a feeling. These two mean a great deal to each other, that much is as clear as the cloudless sky above us.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“He hugs me and I’m home.
He kisses me and I’m never alone.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“Tristan grabs my chin and pulls it toward him and then we’re ripping off our masks and kissing, his lips so soft and yet moving fiercely against mine. I wrap a hand around the back of his head, lace my fingers through his hair, breathe him in, kiss him back. My heart blossoms.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“many more survived because of the brave actions of ordinary men and women who found it in their hearts to be extraordinary.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“Evil wears many disguises, some that can be mistaken for beauty.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“...in the end, we all die. But we don't die equal.”
― David Estes, quote from The Earth Dwellers
“Disdain is only as intense as similarity.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Freddy and Fredericka
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
“I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“who dwells in the past robs the present,”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“Everything in life should be approached as a project. Every project can be broken down into just three things: Action Steps, Backburner Items, and References.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
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.