“If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“find depressing his determination to make his characters suffer even when a little common sense on both his part and theirs could avoid it. Tess is one of the most irritating young women in Victorian fiction. Won”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
“They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
P.D. James
Born place: in Oxford, The United Kingdom
Born date August 3, 1920
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“Whenever he remembered this moment, it lasted forever: a flash of complete separateness as Lydia disappeared beneath the surface. Crouched on the dock, he had a glimpse of the future: without her, he would be completely alone. In the instant after, he knew it would change nothing. He could feel the ground still tipping beneath him. Even without Lydia, the world would not level. He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be sucked into the vacuum she left behind.
More than this: the second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn't want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.”
― Celeste Ng, quote from Everything I Never Told You
“You do have a choice, you know,” Etta told her after a moment. “There is always a choice.”
― Alexandra Bracken, quote from Passenger
“There is nothing more depressing than toast that no one eats.”
― Peter Hedges, quote from What's Eating Gilbert Grape
“Las cosas hermosas, las obras de arte, los objetos sagrados, sufren, como nosotros, los efectos imparables del paso del tiempo. Desde el mismo instante en que su autor humano, consciente o no de su armonía con el infinito, les pone punto y final y las entrega al mundo, comienza para ellas una vida que, a lo largo de los siglos las acerca también a la vejez y a la muerte. Sin embargo, ese tiempo que a nosotros nos marchita y nos destruye, a ellas les confiere una nueva forma de belleza que la vejez humana no podría siquiera soñar en alcanzar.”
― Matilde Asensi, quote from The Last Cato
“He didn’t bother reiterating that they weren’t friends. “Why are you here, Legion?” Questions first, dinner second. Anticipation brightened those crimson eyes. “Me want to play. Will you play with me? Pleassse, pleassse, pleassse.” “Play what?” Saliva dipped from the corner of Aeron’s mouth, and he licked at it. The more he considered the option of eating his foe, the more he liked the thought of having the demon for a snack. Aeron had enough slack in his chains that he’d been able to catch and sustain himself on rats. The demon would make a tasty change. Mustard would have been nice, though. Fucking Reyes. “What game?” “Catch”
― Gena Showalter, quote from The Darkest Pleasure
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Agent Zigzag: A True...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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