Quotes from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It's time you learned how to do that.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Why do fathers look ungainly in their daughter's bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Weddings are about fantasies—you understand? Your job is to photograph the fantasy, not the reality. Never the reality. If I ever see another picture like that, you’re fired.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“There are small blessings, tiny ones that come unbidden and make the hard day one sigh lighter.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“The commodification of beauty is an economic trap designed to enslave the modern woman.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Like many people whose lives had formed around a particularly painful incident, she had grown used to providing ellipses around the event of her brother's death to keep conversations comfortable. At some point the subconscious logic of this had spread to the rest of her life so that she rarely talked about things she had been deeply affected by. It wasn't hard to do.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Of course he had a female following. Was there anything college girls found sexier than being told what to think?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Oh," she said, covering her face with her hand. It was not an oh of disappointment or an oh of surprise but an oh that Amina had never heard before, scraped raw with an emotion Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire. She watched as Paige crossed Akhil's room, undistracted by all the usual things that stopped people- the Greats, his desk, the leather jacket hanging from his chair- and moved straight for his hamper, which she opened up, pulling out a forgotten T-shirt and crushing it into her face. "Oh,", she said again, muffled. Oh. And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“He’s fine,” Kamala said. “It’s not like that. You’re not listening.” “I am listening! You just told me he’s delusional, and I’m asking—” “I DID NOT SAY HE IS DELUSIONAL. I SAID HE WAS TALKING TO HIS MOTHER.” “Who is dead,” Amina said gently. “Obvious.” “And that’s not delusional?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“I mean, if you’re really plunging—you said plunging, right?—into this book, then tethering yourself to every single guidepost along the way isn’t really going to make that happen.” Mr. Tipton’s mirth was palpable. “So you think critical reading is a useless activity? That your classmates are just, what, not experiencing the book?” “I think the best way to experience this book is to let it happen to you and think about what it all means later.” “Later when?” “Later when you’re a high school English teacher.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Kicked out for what?" Amina asked, and Dimple smiled like she'd won the $25,000 question.
"Atheism."
A small murmur went up in the room, followed by a few nervous glances. While everyone knew better than to actually believe in God, the outright denial of one seemed dangerous and possibly gauche”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“A collection of takeout boxes slumped together like old men in bad weather.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“The band in the ballroom announced the cover of a special request, and after a pause, the woman's voice sang out the breathy first line of Etta James's "At Last." Chairs barked as guests rose to greet the champion of all wedding songs, the one that always brought indifferent or fighting or estranged couples to the dance floor for momentary reconciliation.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Cooking was a talent of her mother's that Amina often thought of as an evolutionary way for Kamala to survive herself with friendships intact. Like plumage that expanded to rainbow an otherwise unremarkable bird, Kamala's ability to transform raw ingredients into sumptuous meals brought her the kind of love her personality on its own might have repelled.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Gina Rodgers raised her hand, triggering a class-wide bristle. Everyone wanted to impress Mr. Tipton, but it was Gina who always raised her hand first, like he was going to fall in love with her for her 4.3 GPA or something.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil's, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, "Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she's fucking with?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Was it always this way? Did everyone from high school end up looking like weird facsimiles of other people's parents?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“She shuddered. Pee talkers baffled her. How could they do that? Give you no opportunity to not listen?”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Thomas sniffed. “Don’t let’s start with all that.” “I am not starting anything! You yourself started this business!” “Enough, Kam. I am warning you.” “You don’t warn me when I’m warning you!”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“It was a fever, a hot rage of words.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Thank God for Saturday mornings. A reprieve from the familiar, a day unworn by routines. Anything was possible.”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“We are all we have here. Do you understand? That is it. And we can all talk about old times and Campa Cola and wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back, but none of us ever want to go back. To what? To who? Our own families can’t even stand us for longer than a few days! No, we are home already, like it or not,”
― Mira Jacob, quote from The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“I don't have Paul's calling - I'm not out there being all things to all men to win them for Christ - but sometimes I can be a signpost. Sometimes I can sow a seed. And post-hole diggers and seed sowers are mighty important in the building of the Kingdom.”
― Johnny Cash, quote from Cash

“She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little. ”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

“The decker these ***holes brought with them is top tier, but I'm going to stomp his jelly beans so hard his kids will be born crooked.”
― Amie Kaufman, quote from Gemina

“Most of Mycroft's ideas were far too dangerous to even think about, much less let loose on a world unprepared for hyper-radical thought.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book

“A Harvey Nicks chick with throwaway morals and a trustfund appetite.”
― Saira Viola, quote from Slide, a Modern Satire on the Excess of Greed

Interesting books

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.