“I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth. Yes, I can enliven eternity. Others may have to endure it; I can enjoy it.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“If a man is to have a fault, it should be a passionate one, like insatiable curiosity. It would be a pity to be damned for something paltry.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“He also made all Muslims publicly forswear that part of their Holy Quran which permits them to dupe, cheat and kill all who are not of Islam.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“The wise man shall pass into strange countries, and good and evil shall he try in all things.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty. And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“A man will believe anything that does not cost him anything,” said”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“A life entirely devoted to the avoidance of wrong seldom achieves anything exceptionally right—or anything at all.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
Gary Jennings
Born place: in Buena Vista, Virginia, The United States
Born date September 20, 1928
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“In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land.
Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren't you trying to put your best foot forward?"
Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
“Her father read a prayer over the mound of dirt and they looked at each other, quietly wondering which of them would join the others first.”
― Nadia Hashimi, quote from The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
“Elisa, tell me truly. Have you attained that kind of power? The kind that would frighten an animagus?"
"I have."
Her eyes widen and her lips part. She says to Storm, "You always speak truly, yes?"
"Yes, Your Highness."
"You are also an animagus, are you not?"
"I am."
"And you believe my sister has the kind of power she claims?"
"No," he says. "She is being modest.”
― Rae Carson, quote from The Bitter Kingdom
“History sometimes reproduces, at a distance of many years, the same combinations of circumstances that generate great achievements. But nothing ever repeats itself in exactly the same way.”
― Valerio Massimo Manfredi, quote from Alexander: Child of a Dream
The Innocent Mage
A Woman After God's...
Mister Pip
Even Now
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Scott Pilgrim, Volum...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.
