“you can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“She’s as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.
But you have to open it to find that out.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“She’s lived in Plato’s cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she’s been turned around to face the fire.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It's equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone's finger.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself — that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they're something different than they are.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“When your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“This isn’t life. It’s something that’s playing out in its own self-contained subroutine.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“you can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Hungries toggle between two states. They’re frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they’re never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“some things become true simply by being spoken.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Suddenly she’s an ant all scrunched up on the floor of that world. A static atom in a sea of change. The immensity of earth envelops her, and enters into her. She sips it, with each gulp of heady, supercharged atmosphere.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“They're just kids. And their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was. In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
M.R. Carey
Born place: in Liverpool, The United Kingdom
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“I fell in love with you. I didn't do it on purpose”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Hunter
“As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, quote from Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
“Diary entry, summer 1973. It may be there in a distracted glance out of an open window or in the split second of an absent look when you speak to her, or in the guarded inflections of her voice as she replies, or in the subtle chemistry of touch or smell or the taste of her skin in your mouth, or in some unspecified sixth sense that you can’t name, but when love is over, its signals are louder than disclosure, if only you are willing and open enough to acknowledge them. But of course we shake off these feelings as if they were mere irritations, as if they were unimportant and uninvited guests at a feast. “Not now,” you say, fobbing them off with shallow excuses and feigning more urgent business elsewhere. But they linger long after the party, and skulk in a corner where they plot and fester and return to ask their impertinent questions in the still of night, when she’s sleeping and wearing her child’s face. When she looks so beautiful and vulnerable with her mouth slightly open, and her hair a mess on the pillow, but as you reach to touch her, she turns unconsciously away toward the window, and then the questions start again, and you can’t sleep….”
― Sting, quote from Broken Music
“It's astonishing what a number of churches and idiots there are in the world.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
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The Cat Who Walks Th...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.
