Quotes from The Tenderness of Wolves

“Clearly the secret of happiness...is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping.”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves

“...it just goes to show you can't leave anything behind. You bring it all with you, whether you want to or not.”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves

“I despise this weakness in myself--this endless one-sided conversation that takes the place of action...”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves

“He thought of the next Saturday. [...] He thought of the picnic by the dipping pool on the river, where oaks and willows dappled the sun on water the color of tea; and girls in light summer dresses would sit in pools of pale cotton.
And he knew he would not go.”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves

“He smiled to show he meant no offense, but Scott takes offense like it is going out of style, and bristled.”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves

“Le resulta agotador estar en compañía de personas para las que una sonrisa espontánia es señal de infantil debilidad.”
― Stef Penney, quote from The Tenderness of Wolves

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“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

“I first saw Lucas at the end of July last summer. Of course, I didn't know who he was then... in fact, come to think of it, I didn't even know what he was.
All I could see from the backseat of the car was a green-clad creature padding along the Stand in a shimmering haze of heat; a slight and ragged figure with a mop of straw-blond hair and a way of walking - I smile when I think of it - a way of walking that whispered secrets to the air.”
― Kevin Brooks, quote from Lucas

“Would it be better if I’d had daughters?” she asked the mirror, in apparent earnestness.
“No,” she answered herself. “They’d only marry men, and there you are.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade

“পৃথিবীতে যারা মুখ ফুটে নালিশ করতে পারে না, চুপ করে থাকে, তারাই উলটে আসামি হয়।”
― Rabindranath Tagore, quote from Gora

“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time

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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.

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