“We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“She looked directly up into the northern lights and she wondered if those cold-burning spectres might not draw her breath, her very soul, out of her chest and into the stars.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as your were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“She had watched other women with infants and eventually understood what she craved: the boundless permission-no, the absolute necessity- to hold and kiss and stroke this tiny person. Cradling a swaddled infant in their arms, mothers would distractedly touch their lips to their babies' foreheads. Passing their toddlers in a hall, mothers would tousle their hair even sweep them up in their arms and kiss them hard along their chins and necks until the children squealed with glee. Where else in life, Mabel wondered, could a woman love so openly and with such abandon?”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“It was beautiful, Mabel knew, but it was a beauty that ripped you open and scored you clean so that you were left helpless and exposed, if you lived at all.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“Sometimes these things happen. Life doesn't go the way we plan or hope, but we don't have to be so angry, do we?”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers. (kindle location 2950)”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“In my old age, I see that life is often more fantastic and terrible than stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“I guess maybe I don't want to be warm and safe. I want to live.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“As the glow of the cabin windows turned to flickers through the trees and then to black, her eyes adjusted and the starlight alone on the pure white snow was enough to light her way. The cold scorched her cheeks and her lungs, but she was warm in her fox hat and wool. An owl swooped through the spruce boughs, a slow-flying shadow, but she was not frightened. She felt old and strong, like the mountains and the river. She would find her way home.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“Like a rainbow trout in a stream, the girl sometimes flashed her true self to him.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“She had thought often of Ada's words about inventing new endings to stories and choosing joy over sorrow. In recent years she had decided her sister had been in part wrong. Suffering and death and loss were inescapable. And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“You start seeing things that you’re afraid of… or things you’ve always wished for.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“Doubt crouched over his shoulder, ready to take him by the throat, whispering in his ear, You are an old man. An old, old man.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“It was as if she had reached into her own pocket and discovered a small pebble, as hard as a diamond, that she had forgotten belonged to her.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“She might be curt and ungrateful, but by God she could bake.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“As Jack knelt in the bloody snow, he wondered if that was how a man held up his end of the bargain, by learning and taking into his heart this strange wilderness—guarded and naked, violent and meek, tremulous in its greatness.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“It would be a hard life, but it would be theirs alone. Here at the world's edge, far from everything familiar and safe, they would build a new home in the wilderness and do it as partners.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“...did fear drive her? Fear of the gray, not just in the strands of her hair and her wilting cheeks, but the gray that ran deeper, to the bone, so that she thought she might turn into a fine dust and simply sift away in the wind.....She cooked and cleaned, and cooked and cleaned, and found herself further consumed by the gray, until even her vision was muted and the world around her drained of color.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“I don’t know why, precisely. I believe we were in need of a change. We needed to do things for ourselves. Does that make any sense? To break your own ground and know it’s yours, free and clear. Nothing taken for granted.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“It was beautiful, Mabel knew, but it was a beauty that ripped you open and scoured you clean so that you were left helpless and exposed, if you lived at all.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“When she first fell in love with Jack, she dreamed she could fly...”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“She knew the snow and it carried her gently... She knew the land by heart.”
― Eowyn Ivey, quote from The Snow Child
“I learned a simple lesson about being awesome: always play to the size of your heart, not to the size of your audience. Awesome doesn’t let the crowd determine the size of the performance. Awesome gets up for two people or 200. Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them. Awesome sweeps the parts of store floors that no foot will ever touch. Awesome can’t help itself. Awesome has a huge heart. And that’s what it always plays to. The size of the crowd doesn’t matter. The applause of the audience doesn’t matter.”
― Jon Acuff, quote from Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters
“Sono gli impiegati che inventano, in fin dei conti, tutte queste scartoffie [i passaporti] per avvelenare la vita agli uomini, e le loro disposizioni non vanno prese troppo sul serio.”
― Czesław Miłosz, quote from Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition
“The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quote from The Social Contract
“My father was taking me as seriously as the Ringolds were, but not with Ira’s political fearlessness, with Murray’s literary ingenuity, above all, with their seeming absence of concern for my decorum, for whether I would or would not be a good boy. The Ringolds were the one-two punch promising to initiate me into the big show, into my beginning to understand what it takes to be a man on the larger scale. The Ringolds compelled me to respond at a level of rigor that felt appropriate to who I now was. Be a good boy wasn’t the issue with them. The sole issue was my convictions. But then, their responsibility wasn’t a father’s, which is to steer his son away from the pitfalls. The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn’t. He has to worry about his son’s conduct, he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he’s worrying about the pitfalls—if he wasn’t, it would be wrong. But he’s finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life’s very first pit. And then, all on his own—providing real unity to his existence—to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall.”
― Philip Roth, quote from I Married a Communist
“Not having a moustache, he was in the habit of twirling his eyebrows. “Why do you keep twirling your eyebrows?” a young lady asked him one day. “We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex,” Tito replied. The young lady thought him very witty and fell in love with him. She”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine
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.