“You don't know where you are or where your dreams end and the world begins.”
“She goes where she pleases. She appears unhoped for, uncalled for. She moves through doors and walls and windows. Her thoughts move through minds. She enters dreams. She vanishes and is still there. She knows the future and sees through flesh. She is not afraid of anything.”
“How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along?”
“I laughed when I read about being born with two hearts, one of which is devoted only to destroying humanity.”
“.. the truth is what you can't see but are certain of anyway.”
“You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them.”
“If I know something, I am not a victim. Victims don't know the meaning of their suffering. I am an enemy or a collaborator, not a victim.”
“I have always been intrigued by the journals that girls keep. They are like dollhouses. Once you look inside them, the rest of the world seems very far away, even unbelievable.”
“To sublime: to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state.
To sublimate: to divert the expression of an instinctual desire or impulse from its primitive form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.
Sublime: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth.”
“Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened.”
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to have sex with a man. To be so intimate with another person. Not to hide anything. I don’t know if I could do that. It would have to be a boy anyway, not a grown man, someone as scared as me.”
“It's true that I never wanted to grow up. But how important was it really — to have decided to be human?”
“Hey, Ernessa, where the fuck are you?”
“I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house.”
“Voor iedereen die zich afvraagt of het mogelijk is de puberteit te overleven, is een bevestigend antwoord de enige geruststelling die ik kan geven.”
“Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, words, words, shuffling around in my head. Was I born that way?”
“Boots, it’s college. We’re segregated regardless, whether it be by major or class. This is just the way things are here. It keeps everyone safe.”
“A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground.”
“Finally." The cat sniffed and gave me a look of triumph. "I never thought I would see the day when a human said something sensible.”
“The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.”
“It's not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It's the good ones.”
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.