“There is lace in every living thing: the bare branches of winter, the patterns of clouds, the surface of water as it ripples in the breeze.... Even a wild dog's matted fur shows a lacy pattern if you look at it closely enough.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“I realize the selfishness of children. We love them, and we revolve around their universe, but they don't revolve around ours.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“There is no wrong answer. Even so, it is easy to receive wrong results, simply by asking the wrong question.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“We all find means of anesthesia.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“I like soup, do you like soup?”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.
I am a crazy woman... That last part is true.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“The same way they celebrate the witches, who never existed at all in the days of the witch trials but who thrive here in great numbers now.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“May’s haircuts were Marblehead’s version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother’s hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“There is lace in every living thing: the bare branches of winter, the patterns of clouds, the surface of water as it ripples in the breeze…. Even a wild dog’s matted fur shows a lacy pattern if you look at it closely enough.”
― Brunonia Barry, quote from The Lace Reader
“For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“Amber casts an infinity of shadows, and my Avalon had cast many of its own, because of my presence there. I might be known on many earths that I had never trod, for shadows of myself had walked them, mimicking imperfectly my deeds and my thoughts.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Guns of Avalon
“Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world’s press and defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “Intifada or no intifada, this was business,” Gol explained to me. “The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me—and it was a used car!” A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. “This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah,” said my teacher friend. “The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, ‘The Hebrew University.’ I was really surprised, so I said, ‘What are you going there for?’ and he said, ‘I teach an Arabic class there.’ It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.”
― quote from From Beirut to Jerusalem
“Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way.”
― Steven Johnson, quote from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
“Work never failed to give me that same ego boost I had experienced when filming that first cereal commercial. People bent over backward to give me what I wanted. And what kid doesn’t want adults eating out of his hand, catering to his every wish? Because life was all about getting to the place where I could be happy all the time, acting was the perfect venue. It wasn’t only the ego boost that kept me going. I truly loved what I did.”
― Kirk Cameron, quote from Still Growing: An Autobiography
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.