“As I let go of the past, the past let go of me. ”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“I am gone and am not coming back, but I remember everything.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“To lose one’s name is the beginning of forgetting.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one earthly consolation when time slips out of joint.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“It's only a story.' As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the everchanging world.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“I beg you to understand and accept that no matter what name, I am what I am.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“Allure goes beyond appearances to the way they grace the world. Some women propel themselves by means of an internal gyroscope. Others glide through life as if on ice skates. Some women convey their tortured lives through their eyes; others encircle you in the music of their laughter.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“Between the covers a book can be a sin. I have spent many hours in search of a waking dream. And once having learned to read, I couldn’t imagine my life otherwise. The indifferent children around me didn’t share my enthusiasm for the written word. Some might sit for a good story while told, but if a book had no pictures they showed scant interest.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“I would not want to be a child again, for a child exists in uncertainty and danger. Our flesh and blood, we cannot help but fear for them, as we hope for them to make their way in this life.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“O que a memória perde, a imaginação volta a criar.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“Between the covers, a book can be a sin.”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“In setting down these recollections of my early years so far removed from their unfolding, I am fooled, as all are, by time itself. My parents, long gone from my world, live again. Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one true earthly consolation when time slips out of joint." Chapter 6, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
"Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering light of the campfire, signs of anxious weariness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our shoulders by absent mothers." Chapter 20, The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue”
― Keith Donohue, quote from The Stolen Child
“Я привыкла к своим мыслям, как к своим платьям. В талии они всегда одной и той
же ширины, и вижу я их повсюду, даже на перекрестках. И что хуже всего - из-за них уже и перекрестков не видно.”
― Milorad Pavić, quote from Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words
“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
“Memory, it turns out, is not as reliable as we think. We do not encode high-definition movies of our experiences and then access them at will. Rather, memory is a system dispersed throughout the brain and is subject to all sorts of biases. Memories are suggestible. We often assemble fragments of entirely different experiences and weave them together into what seems like a coherent whole. With each recollection, we engage in editing.*”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“Alice might end up neither good nor bad. She might end up somewhere in between. That would make her very dangerous to know. That girl could be the bane of your life, a blight, a poison on everything you do. Or she might turn out to be the best and strongest friend you’ll ever have. Someone who’ll make all the difference in the world. I just don’t know which way it will go. I can’t see it, no matter how hard I try.”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from The Spook's Apprentice
“I have not encouraged talk about man’s holy privacy, although I do respect and defend man’s right to have it.”
― Mie Hansson, quote from Where Pain Thrives
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.