“Ah, ah. No releas, Paul. Eres muy joven, y aquellos que releen tienden a llenarse de la sabiduría inadecuada antes de tiempo. Ahora tienes que leer, leer todo lo que puedas, lo más heterogéneo posible. Sólo cuando llegas a mis años sabes que aquello que relees no es una pérdida de tiempo.”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“La traición y el asesinato van siempre juntos, como dos diablos unidos en un yugo que por el mismo fin trabajan tan groseramente por interés natural que la imaginación no se asombra ante ellos. Pero a ti, contra todo decoro, te estaba reservado, provocar asombro, al tiempo que traición y asesinato. Sea cual fuere el diablo que ha obrado sobre ti, se ha ganado fama de excelente en el Infierno.”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“Donde el entendimiento no ve más allá de uno mismo”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“En junio de 1922, con un marco se podían comprar dos cigarrillos; con doscientos setenta y dos marcos, un dólar americano. En marzo de 1923, el mismo día en que Paul metió al descuido una patata de más en la bolsa de la señora Schmidt, hacían falta cinco mil marcos para comprar un cigarrillo, y veinte mil para entrar en un banco y salir con un reluciente billete de un dólar.”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“El día empieza a medianoche, en mitad de la oscuridad. Y luego todo es luz.”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“En el que el héroe vence cuando acepta su propia muerte”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“Éste es el apretón de manos secreto del aprendiz, y sirve para que dos hermanos masones se reconozcan como tales. Se realiza presionando el pulgar contra la parte alta del nudillo del índice del saludado, que devolverá idéntico el apretón. Su nombre secreto es BOAZ, el de la columna que representa a la luna en el Templo de Salomón. Si un masón tiene dudas sobre otro que se presenta como tal, le pedirá que deletree este nombre. Los impostores comienzan por la letra B, mientras que el auténtico iniciado comienza por la tercera letra, de este modo: A-B-O-Z.”
― Juan Gomez-Jurado, quote from The Traitor's Emblem
“Sometimes, Abigail, you have to punch a fucking hole in your soul to survive.”
― Annika Martin, quote from Prisoner
“I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from Now is Good
“it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, quote from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
“So the owner of a monster head wants to meet on a path named Nut,” I said. “That’s appropriate.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from The Grendel Affair
“Yeah, well, if he tries, I’m going to burn his office down to his red stapler.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from The Witch With No Name
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.