Quotes from The Magpies

“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

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Popular quotes

“Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can't be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.

“That silent life oppressed me, harassed me. Something kept on making me stare at it. I was tormented by the fear that our whole life might be like that and that I was only finding it out here and there, in bits and pieces. . . . Oh, I was dreadfully afraid! I was out of my mind.. .”

These words and these figures of speech, which were far beyond what was appropriate to Törless's age, flowed easily and naturally from his lips in this state of vast excitement he was in, in this moment of almost poetic inspiration. Then he lowered his voice and, as though moved by his own suffering, he added:

“Now it's all over. I know now I was wrong after all. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know that things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . . And I shan't ever try again to compare one with the other. .”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.”
― Kevin Barry, quote from City of Bohane

“Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from The Post-Office Girl

“To be cold and incapable of pity is one thing; to have compassion and use it only when it's convenient is nothing less than evil.”
― Stacey Jay, quote from Of Beast and Beauty

“I don't think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia

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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.