Sue Townsend · 272 pages
Rating: (34.9K votes)
“There's only one thing more boring than listening to other people's dreams, and that's listening to their problems.”
“8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.”
“Adrian Mole's diary
Easter
Poor Jesus, it must have been dead awful for him. I wouldn't have the guts to do it myself.”
“I used to be the sort of boy who had sand kicked in his face, now I'm the sort of boy who watches somebody else have it kicked in their face”
“I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever.”
“My skin is dead good. I think it must be a combination of being in love and Lucozade.”
“Had a note from Mr Cherry asking me when I can resume my paper round. I sent a note back to say that due to my mother's desertion I am still in a mental state. This is true. I wore odd socks yesterday without knowing it. One was red and one was green. I must pull myself together. I could end up in a lunatic asylum.”
“Mrs O'Leary said, 'Tis the child I feel sorry for', and all the people looked up and saw me, so I looked especially sad, I expect the experience will give me a trauma at some stage in the future. I'm all right at the moment, but you never know.”
“I asked her about my Family Allowance today, she laughed and said she used it for buying gin and cigarettes.”
“said he ‘would rather go without’.”
“Measured my ‘thing’. It was eleven centimetres.”
“My grandma let the dog out of the coal shed. She said my mother was cruel to lock it up. The dog was sick on the kitchen floor. My grandma locked it up again.”
“Just measured my thing. It has grown one centimetre. I might be needing it soon.”
“She is just straight all the way up and down, including her nose and mouth and hair.”
“He was standing very still with his arms folded, staring with poached egg eyes.”
“I had my first wet dream!”
“I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever.”
“Are you too destitute to buy shoes Miss Winters?"
"What makes you ask?"
"I know the Indians are accustomed to wearing such footgear, but I've never seen respectable white women do so. They prefer shoes. From the rear I might have taken you for a squaw."
"Nobody asked you to look at my rear.”
“For a thousand years,
and then a thousand more…I will love you.”
“The soldier was like that. He was an expert in getting other people to do what he wanted. The only creature that could make the soldier do something he did not want was Midnight, and Midnight did things she did not want only when Whippersnapper wanted something. That put the kitten right at the top of the pecking order. A kitten!”
“I want to roll my eyes, but I'm pretty soon they're going to get stuck in the back of my head, and penis puns are really not worth my permanent facial damage.”
“He took a step closer. “Think about it this way, Sidney. You have to walk down the aisle next to me
at this wedding. We’ll be in numerous photos together—photos that the entire Sinclair family will
look at for years to come. If my job as a groomsman is to complement you, do you really want to put
your faith in whatever I might come up with?”
She considered this for a moment.
“Let me just grab my purse.”
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.