“Lemties neįmanoma įžvelgti, nebent jei sapnuoji ar esi apsvaigęs iš meilės.”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“As for Dr. Zajac’s modest contribution to the ongoing pollution of the Charles River… well, let’s be fair… In his hopelessly old-fashioned opinion, a lot worse than dogshit was dumped into the Charles on daily basis.”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“And feeling like a failed sexual predator, because of pregnant Mary…”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“Americans are suckers for an English accent.”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“When they weren’t praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do. They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs – all for no apparent reason…
The schoolgirls also played the worst Western music imaginable, and they took a surfeit of baths – so many baths that the traditional inn where Wallingford and Evelyn Arbuthnot stayed was repeatedly running out of hot water.”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person’s life.”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“Was he nice? He didn’t know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?”
― John Irving, quote from The Fourth Hand
“ 'I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.' ”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Transparent Things
“In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that “Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, quote from Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
“Children are the great gamble. From the moment they are born, our helplessness increases. Instead of being ours to mould and shape after our best knowledge and endeavour, they are themselves. From their birth they are the centre of our lives, and the dangerous edge of existence.”
― Josephine Hart, quote from Damage
“It has never been matter of wonder to me that human resolutions are liable to change; one passion gives them birth, another may destroy them.”
― Antoine François Prévost, quote from Manon Lescaut
“In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. Irish Mary, Eva's sister, would have been happy enough to accept my father's ring, I suppose, had Eva not chosen to stay in Ireland and marry Tom. My mother's first fiancé would have married her gladly if he hadn't been kept too long overseas by the Navy, if my father hadn't beaten him home, on points, a full year before. It might have been Cody or John in the car with your father, that day on Long Island. I might have been gone. Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.”
― Alice McDermott, quote from Charming Billy
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.