“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
“He can still taste you on his lips, smell your scent in his memory, remember when you smiled just for him, and the thought of never having that again is...harrowing. So, he's willing to hurt you because he's focusing on the pain to try to kill everything that you were to him... so that he can survive it.”
― Amy A. Bartol, quote from Incendiary
“He always has a joke to tell or is doing something so seriously ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh at him. Last night, he tried to dry his socks in the microwave.
Yeah.
Then Boo yelled at him. She told him the oven works better.”
― Belle Aurora, quote from Willing Captive
“it's fine to live in the now. but the best thing about now is that there's another one tomorrow. i'm going to start making them count.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“I think that we vote, not to get the best party in, but to keep the worst party out.”
― Melina Marchetta, quote from Looking for Alibrandi
“Dear Madam Vorsoisson, I am sorry.
This is the eleventh draft of this letter. They’ve all started with those three words, even the horrible version in rhyme, so I guess they stay.
You once asked me never to lie to you. All right, so. I’ll tell you the truth now even if it isn’t the best or cleverest thing, and not abject enough either.
I tried to be the thief of you, to ambush and take prisoner what I thought I could never earn or be given. You were not a ship to be hijacked, but I couldn’t think of any other plan but subterfuge and surprise. Though not as much of a surprise as what happened at dinner. The revolution started prematurely because the idiot conspirator blew up his secret ammo dump and lit the sky with his intentions. Sometimes these accidents end in new nations, but more often they end badly, in hangings and beheadings. And people running into the night. I can’t be sorry that I asked you to marry me, because that was the one true part in all the smoke and rubble, but I’m sick as hell that I asked you so badly.
Even though I’d kept my counsel from you, I should have at least had the courtesy to keep it from others as well, till you’d had the year of grace and rest you’d asked for. But I became terrified that you’d choose another first. So I used the garden as a ploy to get near you. I deliberately and consciously shaped your heart’s desire into a trap. For this I am more than sorry, I am ashamed.
You’d earned every chance to grow. I’d like to pretend I didn’t see it would be a conflict of interest for me to be the one to give you some of those chances, but that would be another lie. But it made me crazy to watch you constrained to tiny steps, when you could be outrunning time. There is only a brief moment of apogee to do that, in most lives.
I love you. But I lust after and covet so much more than your body. I wanted to possess the power of your eyes, the way they see form and beauty that isn’t even there yet and draw it up out of nothing into the solid world. I wanted to own the honor of your heart, unbowed in the vilest horrors of Komarr. I wanted your courage and your will, your caution and your serenity. I wanted, I suppose, your soul, and that was too much to want.
I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can’t be gifts.
But gifts can be victories, can’t they. It’s what you said. The garden could have been your gift, a dowry of talent, skill, and vision.
I know it’s too late now, but I just wanted to say, it would have been a victory most worthy of our House.
Yours to command,
Miles Vorkosigan”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from A Civil Campaign
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.