“You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ...”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“It didn't occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor."
"I don't want to survive it."
"I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“... time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“So much in life came down to timing.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types."
"Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliché: the dreary pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“You mustn't wait for someone to rescue you, . . . . A girl expecting rescue never learns to rescue herself. Even with the means, she'll find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants.”
― Ben Fountain, quote from Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
“حينما تكون شاباً، فإن الجسد الخارجي هو ما يهم، كيف تبدو خارجياً، وحينما تكبر يتركز الاهتمام على ما هو بالداخل، ويتوقف الناس عن الاهتمام بالكيفية التي تبدو عليها.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Everyman
“Entonces, un día comencé a escribir, sin saber que me había encadenado de por vida a un noble pero implacable amo. Cuando Dios le entrega a uno un don, también le da un látigo; y el látigo es únicamente para autoflagelarse. [...] La diferencia entre escribir bien y el arte verdadero es sutil, pero brutal. (Capote, pág. 9)
»[...] En un cuento de Henry James, creo que “The Middle Years”, su personaje, un escritor en las sombras de la madurez, se lamenta: “Vivimos en la oscuridad, hacemos lo que podemos, el resto es la demencia del arte”. O palabras parecidas. En cualquier caso, míster James lo expone en toda la línea; nos está diciendo la verdad. Y la parte más negra de las sombras, la zona más demencial de la locura, es el riguroso juego que conlleva. (Capote, pp. 12-13)
»Los escritores, cuando menos aquellos que corren auténticos riesgos, que están ansiosos por morder la bala y pasar la plancha de los piratas, tienen mucho en común con otra casta de hombres solitarios: los individuos que se ganan la vida jugando al billar y dando cartas. (Capote, pág. 13)
»[...] Para empezar, creo que la mayoría de los escritores, incluso los mejores, son recargados. Yo prefiero escribir de menos. Sencilla, claramente, como arroyo del campo. (Capote, pág. 15).
»[...] Entretanto, aquí estoy en mi oscura demencia, absolutamente solo con mi baraja de naipes y, desde luego, con el látigo que Dios me dio (Capote, pág. 17)”
― Truman Capote, quote from Music for Chameleons
“Supuso que no habría ninguna ley que prohibiera a un dragón respirar en silencio.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cycle of the Werewolf
“Monkeys
What! His partner said.
Monkeys are funny, said Peabody.'So why didn't we we pick monkeys.
His partner sighed and shook his head with sad dismay.
Monkeys? Jesus.
Monkeys' idea of fun is throwing their shit at you. Monkeys always take the joke a step too far.”
― Toby Barlow, quote from Sharp Teeth
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.