Craig Lancaster · 298 pages
Rating: (811 votes)
“Any fighter knows that regret that doesn't inform your future is wasted emotion. If you lose and dwell on the missed opportunity rather than the chances to come, you're finished.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m not owed any of that. The opportunities were there, and I did not take them. I find it difficult to live with this sometimes.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“Ernest Hemingway talked about how writing is opening up a vein and bleeding onto the page. You prepared to do that?”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“Hugo and I sat together in the chapel and didn’t say a word to each other. We’d already said them all, in better times and in better places.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“nobody really gets what they deserve from this life, that it’s all a question of what you can take while you have the time.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“The one thing Hugo did better than almost anyone else, the one constant for much of his life, was being taken away in a most ignominious way.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“You can make yourself crazy, refiguring it all after the fact. You did what you thought was best at the time. You helped a friend. That’s what matters.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“this much, too: never again will we keep our hearts waiting.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“I cleared the air again. “Oh, I’m plenty stupid. But not on this. And I’m not cruel. Don’t let him fight again. Hell, you shouldn’t have let him fight tonight. I’m all for that. But it’s not going to kill you to let him go with the knowledge that nobody ever knocked him out cold. Besides, it isn’t me you have to convince anyway.” Squeaky ran the gym, ran the Tuesday night fights, but his daddy, Frank, was the boss. He knew this sure as I did.”
― Craig Lancaster, quote from The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
“I continued working without a break, but in the middle of the third story...I felt myself tiring more than if I had been working on a novel. The same thing happened with the fourth. In fact, I did not have the energy to finish them. Now I know why: The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine, and if the rest of one's life is not spent correcting the novel, it is because the same iron rigor needed to begin the book is required to end it. But a story has no beginning, no end: Either it works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, my own experience, and the experience of others, shows that most of the time it is better for one's health to start again in another direction, or toss the story in the wastebasket. Someone, I don't remember who, made the point with this comforting phrase: "Good writers are appreciated more for what they tear up than for what they publish.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Strange Pilgrims
“I can’t promise you forever, because that’s not long enough. - Jason Dorsey”
― Jasinda Wilder, quote from Falling into Us
“I've never been to the ocean, never heard the waves lick the sand in that quiet shushing you read about in books. I've never been to the zoo, smelled the elephant piss, and heard the cries of the monkeys. I've never had frozen yogurt from one of those places where you pull on the handle and fill your own cup with whatever you like. I've never eaten dinner at a restaurant with napkins that you set on your lap and silverware that isn't plastic. I've never painted my nails like the other girls at school, in bright neons and decadent reds. I've never been more than ten miles from home. Ten miles. It's like I live in the forever ago, not where buses rumble and trains have racks. I've never had a birthday cake, though I've wanted one very much. I've never owned a bra that is new, and had to cut the tags off with the scissors from the kitchen drawer. I've never been loved in a way that makes me feel as if I was supposed to be born, if only to feel loved. I've never, I've never, I've never. And it's my own fault. The things that we never do because someone makes us fearful of them, or makes us believe we don't deserve them. I want to do all my nevers-- alone or with someone who matters. I don't care. I just want to live.”
― Tarryn Fisher, quote from Marrow
“We are all weak most of the time,' she said finally. 'Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.' She smiled at him. 'But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”
― Yaa Gyasi, quote from Homegoing
“Don't struggle too hard to understand people, Sym. They're hideously complicated. Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, quote from The White Darkness
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.