“Half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics.”
― Pat Barker, quote from The Eye in the Door
“(In response to 'In the end moral and political truths have to proved on the body.[ ie put one's body on the line to prove a truth]
That's a very dangerous idea. It comes quite close to saying that the willingness to suffer proves the rightness of belief. But is doesn't. The most it can ever prove is the believer's sincerity. And not always that. some people just like suffering.”
― Pat Barker, quote from The Eye in the Door
“The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.”
― Pat Barker, quote from The Eye in the Door
“One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health.”
― Pat Barker, quote from The Eye in the Door
“Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics”
― Pat Barker, quote from The Eye in the Door
“If we don’t have dreams, Lilly, what do we have? Besides, aren’t you the one who always says to delight myself in the Lord and He will give me the desires of my heart?”
― Lorna Seilstad, quote from Making Waves
“When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“Chronic Your body’s initial, short-term response to damage. Think of acute inflammation as the cleanup before the rebuilding. It decreases quickly as your body begins the healing process. Acute inflammation is a good thing, and you wouldn’t want to lose that function. Chronic”
― quote from It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself--except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.”
― Willa Cather, quote from Lucy Gayheart
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.