Quotes from The Sisters Brothers

“The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied away from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“You are afraid of hell. But that’s all religion is, really. Fear of a place we’d rather not be, and where there’s no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“...I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“It is true, I thought. I am living a life.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Where is your mother, Charlie asked.
Dead.
I’m sorry to hear that
Thank you. But she was always dead.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Mayfield said, "You asked what I was thinking. Well, I will tell you. I was thinking that a man like myself, after suffering such a blow as you men have struck on this day, has two distinct paths he might travel in his life. He might walk out into the world with a wounded heart, intent on sharing his mad hatred with every person he passes; or, he might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things from then on, so as to nourish his desolate mind-set and cultivate something positive or new.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“Your laughter is like cool water to me," I said. I felt my heart sob at these strange words, and it would not have been hard to summon tears: Strange. " "You are so serious all of a sudden," she told me. "I am not any one thing," I said. (137)”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“when I see you, I feel the same. It is when I am away that I lose myself.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“All you will get from me is death.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

“We rode along in silence, thinking our private thoughts. Charlie and I had an unspoken agreement not to throw ourselves into speedy travel just after a meal. There were many hardships to our type of life and we took these small comforts as they came; I found they added up to something decent enough to carry on”
― Patrick deWitt, quote from The Sisters Brothers

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Popular quotes

“Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn’t anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from The Shell Seekers

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“You two were meant to be together. It's like some wicked fucking fairytale love story that you just can't make up, y'know?”
― J.A. Redmerski, quote from The Edge of Never

“There was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe -- the only lady private detective in Botwana -- brewed tea. And three mugs -- one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, quote from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.”
― Sophie Kinsella, quote from Confessions of a Shopaholic

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About BookQuoters

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.