“In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“There is no weather in malls.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Here's a profundity, the best I can do: sometimes you just know… You just know when two people belong together. I had never really experienced that odd happenstance before, but this time, with her, I did. Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us. Whatever I was, well, that was apparently what she wanted… To this day I don't know exactly what she loves about me and that's because I don't have to know. She just does. It was the entire menu of myself. She ordered all of it.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Making love to him was like going through a car wash, except you came out dirtier and more alive at the other end.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“You can not figure out love without figuring out death, too, but the effort it takes can knock the wind out of you. Love is the first cousin of death, they're acquainted with each other, they go to the same family reunions.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Oh”, he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn’t a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“At least with pets, and for all I know , people too, intelligence and quick-wittiness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Anyway, what I've just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
“You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.”
― Charles Baxter, quote from The Feast of Love
Charles Baxter
Born place: in Minneapolis, The United States
Born date May 13, 1947
See more on GoodReads
“Ethan scrubbed his hands over his face. “I hate it when you’re right.” I bit back a grin that only would have gotten me into trouble, and let my mouth do it for me. “Then you must hate me often.” I disappeared into the bathroom before Ethan could throttle me.”
― Chloe Neill, quote from Biting Bad
“Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals
“Alone and lost, appeared this saint,
With pretty gray eyes, darkness can’t taint.
He stole her from cold, from blustering storm,
Kind and gentle, he took her from harm.
Fearful of dark, he created her light,
A jar of gold, chasing demons of night.
Telling stories of love, he brought to her life,
A moment by his side: no pain, no strife.
He gifted her poems, a gesture on whim,
With every word read, she could see only him.
She counted the days until he returned home,
The boy with his light, the girl not alone.
Invisible to all, a shade wandering in dark,
He brought back her faith, with his pure kind heart.
- Elsie”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Soul
“I know what we have to do!” he said, extremely excited.
He pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and took my hands in his. Looking intensely into my eyes, he said, “Babe, we’ve got to have children.”
Wow, I thought, that must have been some fire.
“Ok-aaay,” I said.
“You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” he said, trying to catch me up to his thoughts. “Everything we’ve been working for, the zoo that we’ve been building up, all of our efforts to protect wildlife, it will all stop with us!”
As with every good idea that came into his head, Steve wanted to act on it immediately. Just take it in stride, I said to myself. But he was so sincere. We’d talked about having children before, but for some reason it hit him that the time was now.
“We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.”
― Terri Irwin, quote from Steve & Me
“I finally figured out what e-mail is for. It’s for communicating with people you’d rather not talk to.”
― George Carlin, quote from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
I Can't Tell You
Schild's Ladder
The Outlaws of Sherw...
Telling the Truth: T...
The Black CandleBookQuoters 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.
