“There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“One didn't stop to talk with creatures from one's nightmares.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“Daylight was coming outside, but it was not only that: courage cast its own light.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“For some moments the two men sat quietly, each wrapped in his own thoughts, then Ivor rose. 'I should speak to Levon about tomorrow's hunt,' he said. 'Sixteen [eltors], I think.'
'At least,' the shaman said in an aggrieved tone. 'I could eat a whole one myself. We haven't feasted in a long time, Ivor.'
Ivor snorted. 'A very long time, you greedy old man. Twelve whole days...why aren't you fat?'
'Becaues,' the wisest one explained patiently, 'you never have enough food at the feasts.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“But courage was not lacking in her heart, though it might be foolhardy and unwise.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“Alluding and attacking, summoning a courage, embodying a gallantry of defiance that hurt to see, it was so noble and so doomed.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Summer Tree
“You can't be trapped by other people, you can only be trapped by your own fear. Defy and win.”
― Michael Grant, quote from Hunger
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
“The world going crazy doesn’t mean your mother isn’t still crazy too.”
― Susan Ee, quote from World After
“Halt shook his head. Frankly, he'd seen sacks of potatoes that could sit a horse better than Erak”
― John Flanagan, quote from The Battle for Skandia
“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
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.