“You don't choose your friends, they choose you, and you either reject them or you accept them without reservations.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“[L]ife is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“I imagine he's married. Or was ... He seems damaged in the way that only we women can damage men.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“In affairs of the heart, Princess," César used to say, "one should offer neither advice nor solutions ... just a clean hanky when it seems appropriate.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“life is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“Sometimes," he said at last, as if it were an enormous effort to formulate his thoughts, "I wonder if chess is something man invented or if he merely discovered it. It's as if it were something that has always been there, since the beginning of the universe. Like whole numbers.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“And only when he'd finished and fallen silent did the vague smile return to his lips, in apparent gentle mockery of himself, of the man he had just described and for whom, deep down, he felt neither compassion nor disdain, only a kind of disillusioned, sympathetic solidarity.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“It's usually the father who teaches the child his first moves in the game. And the dream of any son who plays chess is to beat his father. To kill the king. Besides, it soon becomes evident in chess that the father, or the king, is the weakest piece on the board. He's under continual act, in constant need of protection, of such tactics as castling, and he can only move one square at a time. Paradoxically, the king is also indispensable. The king gives the game its name, since the word 'chess' derives from the Persian word shah meaning king, and is pretty much the same in most languages.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“Besides, life is a succession of events that link up with each other whether one wants them to or not.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“At some point in his life, César had realised that no one ever learns from anyone else's mistakes and, consequently, there was only one dignified and proper attitude to be taken by a guardian - which, after all, was what he was - and that consisted in sitting down next to his young ward, taking her by the hand and listening, with infinite kindness, to the evolving story of her loves and griefs, whilst nature took its own wise and inevitable course.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“Y supo de mujeres capaces de desmontar con minuciosidad de relojero los resortes que mueven a un hombre.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“There are exactly the same things in a room at night as there are in the daytime; it's just that you can't see them.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Flanders Panel
“There is no pattern the human mind can devise that does not exist already within the bounds of nature...Everything we do, see, write, notate, all are an echo of the deep seams of the universe. Music is the invisible world made visible through sound.”
― Kate Mosse, quote from Sepulchre
“Perhaps I will be a great man...I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course”
― Lorraine Hansberry, quote from A Raisin in the Sun
“You don´t need to watch everyone if everyone believes they're beeing watched. (...) Punishment isn't necessary, but the inevitability of punishment has to be programmed into the brain.”
― John Twelve Hawks, quote from The Traveler
“Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested within six paces of the anarchist nicknamed the Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair.”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from The Secret Agent
“Na kvantnoj razini, naš svemir se može vidjeti kao neodredivo mjesto, predvidivo na statistički način jedino uz primjenu dovoljno velikih brojeva. Između tog svemira i nekog razmjerno predvidivog u kojem se prolaz nekog planeta može vremenski odrediti unutar pikosekunde, u igru ulaze druge sile. U srednjem svemiru, u kojem svakodnevno živimo, glavna sila je ono u što vjerujete. Vaša vjerovanja određuju odvijanje dnevnih događaja. Vjeruje li nas dovoljno u nešto, možemo to učiniti postojećim. Uređenje vjerovanja stvara filtar kojim se kaos prosijava u red.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Heretics of Dune
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.