“Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Que diga amor? Love? Hate? Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird's call, of a child's secret thoughts in her mother's womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman's breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“For so long this had been my life, but it was all in the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, 'Let me cross over,' the men of Gilead asked him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he replied, 'No,' they said, 'All right, say Shibboleth.' If he said, 'Sibboleth,' because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Fourty-thousand were killed at the time.
- Judges 12:4-6”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it's never been an infant's whimper, a boy's whisper, a young man's mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebatstien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present...”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from The Farming of Bones
“strange thing about her is that she sometimes draws the future. Only her brother Logan, fighting his cancer diagnosis, knows what she can do. But when a stranger named Ethan appears, determined to protect Caspia and her brother from dangers he won’t explain, she’s not sure what to think. Strangers almost never come to Whitfield. They certainly don’t follow her around, frightening her one moment and treating her like glass the next. And they certainly don’t look exactly like the subject of her most violent drawing.”
― Jamie Ayres, quote from 18 Things
“The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
“But at home, that same day he'd jumped into the fountain, he'd gotten so anxious, pacing around the living room listening to his parents try to calm him, that he suddenly just lost it completely and slapped his face. He immediately started crying, confused and guilty, looking up at his parents like he had no idea how it happened. And, really, that's the way it always was with the hitting. It would happen so fast, his body shaking to release the tension that built up from all the thoughts swirling through his mind and all the air he was having trouble breathing and all the loud beating of his own heart ringing in his ears. It had to get out and that was the path it chose. Slap. Instant relief.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Highly Illogical Behavior
“A child is the quickest to trust because they have no concept of the depravity of our species.”
― A.R. Torre, quote from The Girl in 6E
“Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.”
― Chris Hedges, quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
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.
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