“The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“Instead of getting the house like Mount Vernon, they had moved into the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, and Betsy had become pregnant, and he had thrown the vase against the wall, and the washing machine had broken down. And Grandmother had died and left her house to somebody, and instead of being made vice-president of J. H. Nottersby, Incorporated, he had finally arrived at a job where he tested mattresses, was uneasy when his boss said he wanted to see him without explaining why, and lived in fear of an elevator operator.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who'll say anything for pay.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness – they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the sidelines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“Believe me, I want you to have a good time,' he said gently, 'but people who have that primarily in mind rarely accomplish it.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“I could get a job in an advertising agency. I’ll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“It doesn't really matter. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“A birth usually has more consequences than a death.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“The guys were taking bets on the winner. Half were betting on the old woman.” Yasha nodded in agreement. “The babushka is a biter.” “Though nice style points there with the hat,” Calvin added. “We’ve never considered using hats as weapons. Maybe we should add it to our training.” “I’d break every bone in my hand if I punched you,” I said. “You realize that’s the only thing saving you, right?”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from The Grendel Affair
“I held my breath as Dali sighed, eyes averted as he balanced what was at stake and what it might cost. Pride was his fulcrum, unfairly shifting the weight so that one side had greater force than the other to make a wrong decision more than possible, but likely. We were going to doom the world to another wave of needless violence because of pride, I thought,”
― Kim Harrison, quote from The Witch With No Name
“Sometimes love and chaos are the same thing,” Mariel said softly.”
― Katharine McGee, quote from The Thousandth Floor
“I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Going to Meet the Man
“There were lots of ways to lose your farm. In the beginning it was mostly violent. Now, though, the process had become highly formal, and in many ways more chilling. Ordinary citizens who supported the ruling party and claimed they wanted to farm simply applied to the Registrar of Deeds for a farm and, if approved, got what was called an offer letter. This applicant, known as an A2 farmer, simply drove onto the farm he had been allocated, handed his letter to the farmer if he was still on the land, and told him he was the new owner. “It’s like winning the lottery, except you don’t even have to buy a ticket,” Dad told me.”
― quote from The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
Joan of Arc
A Painted House
Submarine
Abuse
The Collected Poems,...
At the Mountains of...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.
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