“I was perhaps as intensely naïve to think I could get a job working with the Yankees. But the lesson to me is that with a great deal of persistence and a little bit of common sense, even if the thing you’re chasing may not exist, you can sometimes will it into being.”
― quote from The Moth
“that when we can celebrate and truly own what it is that makes us different, we’re able to find the source of our greatest creative power.”
― quote from The Moth
“There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish Room. They were both named Inez. And on that day Big Inez gave Little Inez a plantation all her own. Two thousand acres. Then her little sister came running in and said, “Grandmother, can I have a plantation too?” And Big Inez looked down and said, “Child, your name is Alice. You were named for your Yankee grandmother. Go ask your Yankee grandmother for a plantation.”
― quote from The Moth
“The great storyteller Frank O’Connor defined it best, saying once that every good story should end, in spirit, with the exact same words: “And everything that ever happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.”
― quote from The Moth
“Orwell’s famous lesson, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― quote from The Moth
“How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.”
― quote from The Moth
“We were in an entirely other field by this time and in the company of white-coloured brown-coloured cows. They watched us quietly as we made a path between them and changed their attitudes slowly as if to show us all of the maps on their fat sides. They gave us to understand that they knew us personally and thought a lot of our families and I lifted my hat to the last of them as I passed her as a sign of my appreciation.”
― Flann O'Brien, quote from The Third Policeman
“THE FOX AND THE CROW
A Crow was sitting on a branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a Fox observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese. Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, "What a noble bird I see above me! Her beauty is without equal, the hue of her plumage exquisite. If only her voice is as sweet as her looks are fair, she ought without doubt to be Queen of the Birds." The Crow was hugely flattered by this, and just to show the Fox that she could sing she gave a loud caw. Down came the cheese, of course, and the Fox, snatching it up, said, "You have a voice, madam, I see: what you want is wits.”
― Aesop, quote from Aesop's Fables
“Most of us didn’t feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We’d been assured that we wouldn’t even feel it happen, just free fall all the way. I wasn’t convinced. As a physics student, I’d had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time — Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school — but the mathematical model seemed clear enough. The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light. Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted. At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference. But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1, made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.”
― Joe Haldeman, quote from The Forever War
“Perhaps—the insight came suddenly—perhaps love existed in its truest, deepest form when one partner saw into the soul of the other and never shrank from what was discovered there.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from About a Boy
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.