“Life is stronger than anything else, there is always a solution, and I will find it. I’m sure of that.”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“With every new reading, I’m gripped by the ending’s harsh lessons. ‘Don’t expect anything of him,’ it seems to be telling me. ‘Even if someday he realizes his own folly, he is dangerous and beyond redemption. Get out!”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“My true treasure is your presence, it is the rays of intelligence that you have poured into my heart.”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“The only sustenance that matters is the love in my dog’s eyes and the hope of meeting people who dare to truly live.”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“Great minds defend values—like justice in the case of Victor Hugo, and equality for Emile Zola.”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“the fight is about believing the unbelievable’, and who also believes that ‘life flows through everything’.”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“Playing chess with my father is torture. I have to sit very upright on the edge of my chair and respect the rules of impassivity while I consider my next move. I can feel myself dissolving under his stare. When I move a pawn he asks sarcastically, 'Have you really thought about what you're doing?' I panic and want to move the pawn back. He doesn't allow it: 'You've touched the piece, now you have to follow through. Think before you act. Think.”
― quote from The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
“Remember who you can trust, and keep them close.”
― Shannon Messenger, quote from Everblaze
“Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.
In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.
That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.
And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, quote from Prozac Nation
“Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”
― Steven Erikson, quote from Deadhouse Gates
“But you know all about that, being sorry and having no words to say something when you know you should but you just can't”
― Heather Gudenkauf, quote from The Weight of Silence
“It was just like him, she thought; with him, a happy ending was always a foregone conclusion. But such was the power of his faith that when she was with him; she found herself believing in happy endings, too.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept
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.