“That is almost always the way with stories. True to their very core, even when the events and the people in them are different.”
― quote from The Glass Sentence
“Men may irritate women entirely by accident, but I believe they infuriate one another wholly by design.”
― quote from The Glass Sentence
“There can be no scholar without the heroic mind.”
― quote from The Glass Sentence
“To be connected to the world is a constant, difficult labor.”
― quote from The Glass Sentence
“Some things (and people) go elsewhere and soon return. Others go elsewhere and appear to want to stay. In those cases, the only solution for the very determined is to find them: to go elsewhere and bring them back.”
― quote from The Glass Sentence
“She was one part melancholy kindness, two parts mysterious unease.”
― quote from The Glass Sentence
“But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass
“It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
“So now you think the augury was misinterpreted. It said you had to go get someone. It didn’t say who that someone was.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, quote from The Mirror of Her Dreams
“ذلك أننا لا نعرف ابدا أين يتوقف التأكيد المشروع للهوية وأين يبدأ التطاول على حقوق الآخرين ! ألم أقل منذ قليل أن كلمة هوية, صديق مزيف ؟ فهي تبدأ بالكشف عن تطلع مشروع وتصبح فجأة أداة حرب. إن الانزلاق من جهة الى أخرى غير مُدرَك, كأنه طبيعي, وجميعنا نستسلم له أحيانا. نفضح الظلم, وندافع عن حقوق شعب يعاني, ونجد أنفسنا في الغداة شركاء في مذبحة.”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
“It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love
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.