Quotes from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Normal is a setting on a washing machine.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Real strength isn’t control. It’s knowing when to let go.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“My heart was defective. It was defecting a little more each day.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Uncharted territory,” I said. “The parts on the maps of our lives that we don’t understand. In cartographer’s language they call these places sleeping beauties.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“You see, that’s what’s so odd, how everyone thinks they’re normal and the truth is no one in the world is normal at all. Isn’t that wonderful?”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“You’re like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he’d glow.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“That’s what love hotels are for.”
“I know,” says Ai, “but this man comes alone. He says he comes to this room and thinks about the lovers who have been here before him, imagines himself as one of them, imagines himself having someone to hold. He tells whoever is reading this that he’s grateful for the love we share without knowing.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“He was all surface, written on by those who’d pass him, like a love hotel diary.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That’s pretty much Japan through and through.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing

About the author

Popular quotes

“Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The Fever

“Actually,” Jayden said, “Not completely unlike the Cloak of Invisibility, although different in that those individuals using these devices wouldn’t become completely invisible. Exactly.” “So nothing like it,” Matthias said. “Moron status secured.”
― A.E. Kirk, quote from Demons in Disguise

“The orchestra strikes up with ‘Stockholm in My Heart’, and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star

“Well ..." He glanced back at the calico. "The Valkyries told you that Freya's chariot is drawn by two house cats, right?"
She smiled. "Right. I forgot that." She looked at the cat. "Hey, make yourself useful. Find a friend and a chariot, okay? My feet are getting sore."
The cat eyed her balefully.”
― K.L. Armstrong, quote from Thor's Serpents

“In our folk nobody has any experience of youth, there’s barely even any time for being a toddler. The children simply don’t have any time in which they might be children........Indeed... there’s simply no way that we would be able to provide our children with a viable childhood, one that is real. Naturally, there are consequences. There’s a certain ever present, not to be liquidated childishness that permeates our folk; We often act in ways that are totally and utterly ridiculous and, indeed, precisely like children we do things that are crazy, letting loose with our assets in a manner that is bereft of all rationality, prodigious in our celebrations, partaking in a light-headed frivolousness that is divorced from all sensibility, and often enough all simply for the sake of some small token of fun, so much do we love having our small amusements. But our folk isn’t only childish, to a certain extent we also age prematurely, childhood and old age mix themselves differently with us than by others. We don’t have any youth, we jump right away into maturity and, then, we remain grown-ups for too long and as a consequence to this there’s a broad shadow of a certain tiredness and a sort of hopelessness that colours our essential nature, a nature that as a whole is otherwise so tenacious and permeated by hope, strong hope. This, no doubt, this is related to why we’re so disinclined toward music—we’re too old for music, so much excitement, so much passion doesn’t sit well with our heaviness;”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Short Stories

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.