“Some things you remember, and some you forget. Of the things you remember, you have to wonder what’s real and what’s translated into a memory from a story you heard.”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“I really don’t worry about that anymore. When you’re dying, you don’t have time for that junk. The shit people did to you? It’s over.”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“And I think, What’s the opposite of suffocation?”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“It’s hard to explain,” she says. “I would say that I’m more spiritual than religious at this point.” “What does that even mean?” I stare upward at the gleaming stars. “To me, religion is the Walmart of spirituality.”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“More and more these days, I'm realizing that I might be crazy, but I'm loved too. I don't think I ever really knew that before, but I do now.”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“I worry sometimes that our world actually values a lack of intelligence. Like we are considered normal if we spend our time thinking about what one of the Kardashians wears to a party, and we are considered strange if we wonder whether a bee’s parents grieve if said bee dives into the Central Park Reservoir and never makes it back to the hive.”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“Maybe in life, most of us feel inferior because we compare our dress rehearsals to [Janelle Monae’s] final performance. --page 113”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“Sitting in a church makes you no more of a Christ follower than sitting in a Ford dealership makes you a Mustang owner.” I”
― Bill Konigsberg, quote from The Porcupine of Truth
“p. 371 – 372
Living in a paradise of magnificent meadows and forests abundant with wild game, berries, and nuts, the Utes were self-supporting and could have existed entirely without the provisions doled out to them by their agents at Los Pinos and White River. In 1875 agent F. F. Bond at Los Pinos replied to a request for a census of his Utes: “A count is quite impossible. You might as well try to count a swarm of bees when on the wing. They travel all over the country like the deer which they hunt.” Agent E. H. Danforth at White River estimated that about nine hundred Utes used his agency as a headquarters, but he admitted that he had no luck in inducing them to settle down in the valley around the agency. At both places, the Utes humoured their agents by keeping small beef herds and planting a few rows of corn, potatoes, and turnips, but there was no real need for any of these pursuits.
The beginning of the end of freedom upon their own reservation came in the spring of 1878, when a new agent reported for duty at White River. The agent’s name was Nathan C. Meeker, former poet, novelist, newspaper correspondent, and organizer of cooperative agrarian colonies. Most of Meeker’s ventures failed, and although he sought the agency position because he needed the money, he was possessed of a missionary fervor and sincerely believed that it was his duty as a member of a superior race to “elevate and enlighten” the Utes. As he phrased it, he was determined to bring them out of savagery through the pastoral stage to the barbaric, and finally to “the enlightened, scientific, and religious stage.” Meeker was confident he could accomplish all this in “five, ten, or twenty years.”
In his humourless and overbearing way, Meeker set out systematically to destroy everything the Utes cherished, to make them over into his image, as he believed he had been made in God’s image.”
― Dee Brown, quote from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
“We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.”
― Muriel Barbery, quote from The Elegance of the Hedgehog
“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from Jude the Obscure
“flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo”
― Virgil, quote from The Aeneid
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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