“You’re mad. Rats don’t try and get in through closed doors!”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“And soon they would be living together. They would be sharing a bedroom and he would live with her fragrance – as part of the background of his life – every day. Breath and hair and skin and sweat and all the atoms and particles”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, jagged thoughts and dark music looping inside his head, preventing him from sinking into deeper sleep, where he wanted, and needed, to be.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“In cities, after all, you are always within screaming distance of a psychopath.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“You know what HTML really stands for? How to meet ladies.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“She was both his compass and his map, and he would be lost on his own. Lost in the darkness.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“Lemsip for her. While waiting for the kettle”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“would melt, liquid metal dripping to”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“cities, after all, you are always within screaming distance of a psychopath.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“strength from her. He honestly didn’t know what”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“As soon as Kirsty walked into the living room, just behind Jamie, she knew something was wrong. There were no immediate tangible signs, but she could feel it. The atmosphere in the room felt wrong. There had been a shift in the air, a strange shape imprinted on the molecules that hung around them and made up the fabric of the room. She could smell it, this unwelcome odour. She felt like an animal, its hackles rising as it caught the scent of a stranger, an invader, an enemy encroaching on its territory.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“For example, basil is great for curing stomach cramps, and sage is good for anxiety or depression.”
― Mark Edwards, quote from The Magpies
“If you've never known someone your own age who's died, you can't imagine what it feels like. It's as if you were walking on a glass floor and it suddenly shatters and now you're falling and falling and there's broken glass in the air all around you and no bottom in sight.”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead
“If you want something to grow and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from looking at it, you have to wait.”
― Virginia Euwer Wolff, quote from Make Lemonade
“If you tell a guy in the street you're hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That's something I never understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple - you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That's what I think about, more than about whose trap it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs ? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what the bastards don't want you to do - to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable. That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn't be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million-billion varieties, maybe there wouldn't even be glass in the windows, maybe you'd have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn't be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn't be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn't be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because-there wouldn't be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn't need a visa or a passport or a carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?”
― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn
“There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]
“You know,' I answered, with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes' heart before, 'that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from His Last Bow
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.