“The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“Not as others had wanted to learn, for power or excitement, or for the prosecution of some enmity or private greed; but because he had seen, darkly with a child's eyes, how the gods move with the winds and speak with the sea and sleep in the gentle herbs; and how God himself is in the sum of all that is on the face of the lovely earth.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“This is the way of love, I find; one longs so fervently for the beloved to achieve the best ends that he is spared nothing.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“In all that ever mattered, you are unchanged. Old? Yes, we must all grow old. Age is nothing but the sum of life. And you are alive, and back with me here. By the great God of heaven, I have you back with me. What should I fear now?”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“All her violence had drained away, replaced by a fear older and deeper than anything she'd ever experienced. An old, old recognition. Something inside her knew him from a time when girls took skin bags to the river to get water, a time when panthers walked in the darkness outside mud huts. From a time before electric lights, before candles, when darkness was fended off with stone lamps. When darkness was the greatest danger of all.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Hunter
“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, quote from The Way the Crow Flies
“If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, quote from Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
“Perhaps it is the scarcity of vocabulary that is the root of the problem. Love seems like such a deeply inadequate word for a concept with so many complex shades and shapes and degrees of intensity. If the Inuit have twenty words for the concept of snow, then perhaps it is because they live in a realm where the differences between each type of snow are of vital importance to them, and the minutiae of their specific vocabulary reflects that central importance. Yet we, who spend vast amounts of our time, energy, and ingenuity thinking about love, being loved, loving, longing for love, living for love, even dying for love, have no more than this paltry, troublesome word that is no more descriptive or effective than the word fuck is for expressing the wonderful and infinite varieties of sexual congress. It’s rather like a city dweller looking at the jungle and dumbly grunting the word trees for the manifold diversity that faces him. There are plants out there that can feed him, plants that can cure him, and plants that can kill him, and the sooner he identifies them and names them, the safer he will be.”
― Sting, quote from Broken Music
“Helena: Will they be happier when they can feel pain?
Dr. Gall: On the contrary. But they will be technically more perfect.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
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.