“I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.”
“There is a sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me. So glad to see you, I say, misses you so much, thought about you ever day.”
“Silly bug, fly on the wall, our first fight and how quickly we are over it. Of course I don't hate you, dearest, beloved, most cherished, I owe you everything.”
“Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so lily-white? The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find love and understanding—the more you feel entitled, allowed, even encouraged, to cheat, to lie, to steal, and then later, even to kill. That you're just beginning to feel it now only means you have been lucky for too long.”
“Alice, I hand you her name gently, suggesting that if you hold it, carefully as I do, pressed close to the heart, you might at the end of this understand how confusing the beating of two such similar hearts can be and how one finally had to stop.”
“Today's the day. The clock is ticking. I have been summoned to speak. I go before the committee with a chance to exonerate myself, to extricate, or at least explain the debacle that has become my life.
A statement, a simple speech, a song and dance that will set them straight, an incandescent incantation, a charming presentation, a shoe of sorts, the show of shows, it's the only chance I've got. My appeal must be appealing, not entirely revealing, tucking the tendency to be argumentative, artfully augmenting my audacity with the acuity of my observation and the alarming accuracy of my action. What can I possibly say or do? Act normal.”
“The criminal element is contained – held under lock and key – and still it happens. How could it go one without me (us) – is that too narcissistic a mind? What I’m getting at is that, with so many of us locked up, you’d think it would stop. That it continues means that it is you and not me. Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so lily-white? The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find love and understanding – the more you feel entitled, allowed, even encouraged, to cheat, to lie, to steal, and then later, even to kill. That you are just beginning to feel it now only means you have been lucky for too long.”
“To go there with her and explain in greatest detail the goings-on, to suggest to her that perhaps the sickness she experiences, the nauseating turn, is her own internal structure cramped by the rise of a desire heretofore unknown. I would also suggest that the impulse to 'lose one's lunch,' to spill such rich and fine fare as the 3 or 4 peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches consumed under the elm by the canoe pond only an hour before, is not so much a mark of aversion as a pronouncement of attraction, the making room for greater possibility.”
“A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so to speak. While he was buried deep in a muff, some sharp thing slipped, and his prize patient, Mrs Mavis Gilette, woke to find a harpoon hole in her cheek and her lost licker languishing on the floor.”
“Even though I thought I wouldn't - could never - I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one's self, like seeing one's self with a certain sense of remove.”
“when we fuck-and we do fuck,frequently-there is some-thing about her skin,about the way we fit into each other, that it is as if I'm inside out, touching myself.there is something between us not made on Earth.”
“I want to do with her as one would a proper lover, fuck her ferociously,working up an appetite for a beasts breakfast and then returning to bed, to do it again, finally rousing at two or three,to snack, feeding each other in bed like baby birds still in the nest, fucking again, then sleeping until supper with the comfort of newfound familiarity.”
“But naked wasn’t something done around human pups—although he wanted to ask the men why naked from the waist up was all right for them but females remained covered. That didn’t seem fair. Shifting”
“Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.”
“She climbs down and pours half an inch of Jim Beam into a Bengals mug that came free with a tank of gas. Alice would just as soon get her teeth cleaned as watch the Bengals. That's the price of staying around when your heart's not in it, she thinks. You get to be cheerleader for a sport you never chose.”
“In the early morning hours, Hannah read at the table by the dim light of dawn. She leaned in close to the pages, chin resting on her folded arms, eyes racing over the words, like chasing butterflies over the hills, to catch as many as she could before going to work. She wondered at how such tales of magic could be contained by mere paper and ink for her to read again and again.”
“Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.”
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.