“You may kill for yourselves, and your mates,
and your cubs as they need, and you can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and
SEVEN TIMES NEVER KILL MAN.”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Second Jungle Book
“ye kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the woods with”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Second Jungle Book
“What is has been. What will be is no more than a forgotten year striking backward.”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Second Jungle Book
“This talk went in at one ear and out at the other, for a boy who spends his life eating and sleeping does not worry about anything till it actually stares him in the face. But, one year, Baloo's words came true, and Mowgli saw all the Jungle working under the Law.”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Second Jungle Book
“Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Second Jungle Book
“Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Second Jungle Book
“He shakes his head, and he's saying something, and I think I might kiss him. Because I've never kissed anyone before. (I was afraid I might bite.) And I've never wanted to kiss anyone but him. (I won't bite. I won't hurt him.) I just want to kiss him, then go. "Simon...," I say. And then he kisses me.”
― Rainbow Rowell, quote from Carry On
“A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Haroun and the Sea of Stories
“The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum”
― Larry Niven, quote from Ringworld
“A secret is a strange thing.
There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.
And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.
Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.
All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, quote from The Dream Thieves
“For everyone and everything, there is a time to die. Some do not know it, or would delay it, but its truth cannot be denied. Not when you look into the stars of the ninth gate.”
― Garth Nix, quote from Abhorsen
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.