“I know how betrayal and disillusionment feel, when someone who could give you the world refuses even a tiny piece of it.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“The Chicago winter is harsh. But every now and then God blesses us with a thirty-or forty-degree day to remind us that misery comes and goes.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“But he holds me so tightly that for a moment, the emotions are at bay. The sadness and fear, the regret and the loathing. He bottles them up inside his arms so that for a split second I don’t have to be the one carrying the weight of them. For this moment, the burden is his.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“Teenagers believe they’re invincible—nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“That I love her. That I’m sorry.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“We fall into oblivion this way, into a world where nothing matters. Nothing but us.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“The weathermen warn us for days of the impending snowstorm that's to arrive Thursday night. The grocery stores have run out of bottle water as people prepare to take shelter in their homes; my God, I think, it's winter, an annual certainty, not the atomic bomb.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“His arms wrap around me from behind, and my heart rhythm slows to a steady jog. His chin rests on the top of my head, and my breath comes back to me, oxygen filling my lungs.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“She said something to you and you smiled and I thought to myself that I'd never seen anything so... I don't know... I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“What did you want?” she asks. What I wanted was a dad. Someone to take care of my mother and me, so I didn’t have to do it myself. But what I tell her is Atari.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“There was a time in my life when the eyes of men followed me. When men thought I was beautiful. When I passed through a room on the arm of James Dennett and every man and his covetous wife turned to stare. I feel the detective’s arms around me still, the reassurance and compassion, the warmth of his flesh. But now he stands feet away and I find myself staring at the floor. His hand comes to my chin. He lifts my face, forces me to see him. “Mrs. Dennett,” he says, and then he starts again, knowing I’m not quite looking. I can’t. I’m too ashamed to see what’s in his eyes. “Eve.” I look and there’s no anger, no scorn. “There isn’t anything in the world that I’d rather do. It’s just that...under the circumstances...” I nod. I know. “You’re an honorable man,” I say. “Or a good liar.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“She says that the sky was the color of persimmon and sangria, shades of red only God could make.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“Picasso, that’s abstract art. Kandinsky. Jackson Pollock.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“The ducks and geese fly overhead. Everyone is leaving me.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“Beethoven wrote Für Elise around 1810, though Elise was actually supposed to be Therese, a woman he was to marry in the same year. Before”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“But mostly I think of the things I didn’t do.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“I didn't set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child's play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn't do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“According to research, people who live with animals have decreased anxiety and lower blood pressure. They have lower cholesterol. They are more relaxed and less stressed and are, overall, in better health. Unless of course you have a dog who pees uncontrollably wherever it wishes or eats your furniture to shreds.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“She’s disoriented, her visions cluttered, random memories running adrift in her mind.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“But if I wanted to atone, I would have bought her that sketch pad.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“an artist. My mother’s deluded sense of reality.” What pisses me off is that she talks like she got the short end of the stick. Like her life is full of hard knocks. She doesn’t have a fucking clue what tough luck is like. I think of the mint-green trailer home, of sitting out a storm in a makeshift shelter while we watched our home blow over. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?” I ask. A bird begins to warble. In the distance, another returns its call. Her voice is quiet. “I never asked you to feel sorry for me. You asked a question. I gave you an answer,” she confides. “You’re just full of self-pity, aren’t you?” “It isn’t like that.” “Always the victim.” I’m unsympathetic. This girl doesn’t know a damn thing about tough luck. “No,” she hisses at me. She thrusts the fishing rod into my hands. “Take it,” she says. She unzips”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“Mi intuición, sin embargo, me dice que algo le ha sucedido a mi hija. Algo malo.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“I've been following her for the last few days. I know where she buys her groceries where she has her dry cleaning done, where she works. I've never spoken to her. I wouldn't recognize the sound of her voice. I don't know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she's scared. But I will.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“She says that she used to enjoy, when darkness set in, when the outside world changed. She describes it for me: the way the streetlights and buildings twinkled in the night sky. She says that she liked the anonymity of it, and all the possibilities that developed when the sun went to sleep. But now the darkness terrifies her, all the nameless things on the other side of the silk drapes.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“I watch the way her skin becomes red from the cold. The way her hair blows around in the breeze. She tucks it behind an ear, hoping to contain it, but it doesn't work. Not all things like to be contained.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“I wonder if she could ever this right. This scene. In her sketch pad. The shape of the blue lake and the leaves spilled across the ground. The forest-green pine and evergreen trees. The enormous sky. Could she ever get the wind whipping through the remains of trees? Could she draw the cold air that eats at our hands and ears until they burn?”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
“But he holds me so tightly that for a moment, the emotions are at bay. The sadness and fear, the regret and the loathing. He bottles them up inside his arms so that for a split second I don't have to be the one carrying the weight of them. For this moment, the burden is his.”
― Mary Kubica, quote from The Good Girl
Mary Kubica
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“Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Matter
“Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.”
― Alexander Theroux, quote from Darconville’s Cat
“And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“You ruin me, woman,” he breathes, before taking my mouth in his.”
― River Savage, quote from Incandescent
“Apparently she got stranded out at sea again this time. It happens to her every time she goes to an ocean. She just bobs along on her back enjoying the sun and the undulating waves and then gets too far out and can't get back and has to be rescued. She doesn't panic at all, just sort of slowly drifts away from shore and waits to be noticed or missed. Her big thing is going out beyond the wake where it's calm and she can bob in the moonlight far out at sea. That's her biggest pleasure. Our family is trying to escape everything all at once, even gravity, even the shoreline. We don't even know what we're running away from. Maybe we're just restless people. Maybe we're adventurers. Maybe we're terrified. Maybe we're crazy. Maybe Planet Earth is not our real home.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from All My Puny Sorrows
Life Before Legend:...
Changing the Game
How the Mind Works
Promise Me
Just in Case
Before Jamaica LaneBookQuoters 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.
