“Only please, do be careful to bear in mind that Mordak’s a goblin. Enlightened, yes, but a goblin. He likes his employees loyal or lightly steamed on a bed of bruised rocket.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“He turned and gave the Dark Elf a nasty look. “They can do that,” he said, “mess with your head, using arcane mind control techniques. Well-known fact.”
The Dark Elf sniggered. “I wish,” he said. “Sadly, no. You’re thinking of journalism, which is slightly different.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“After all, why be right when you can be happy.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“He believes it’s time to redesign Evil from the ground up; to face the challenges and opportunities of a diverse, rapidly changing society.
“He’s thinking of calling it,” said Miss Gold, “New Evil.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“There comes a time when a man must stand up and do what he knows is Wrong.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“And if I’ve got to die, I want to die an editor.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Look not for too long into the doughnut, lest the doughnut look into you.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“The doughnut was definitely looking at him. Hello, sailor, it seemed to be saying.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Mordak has the mental clarity to recognise that when it comes to running a bureaucracy, Elves can achieve a degree of blinkered ruthlessness that makes goblins look like teddy-bears.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“He could hear rain pattering on the thatch, like a million mice line-dancing.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Mr Winckler clapped his hands together. “Evil, as personified by me. Meet the new Dark Lord. But you can call me Albert.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.
But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.
Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”
― Alan Moore, quote from Watchmen
“There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from The Divine Comedy
“People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from American Gods
“Stars are beautiful, but they may not take part in anything, they must just look on forever.”
― J.M. Barrie, quote from Peter Pan
“She was indeed a girl of exquisite beauty. She was one of those languid women made of dark honey smooth and sweet and terribly sticky.”
― Patrick Süskind, quote from Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
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.
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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.