“Among the many fox magics her sobo had delighted in describing, the one that had most captured her imagination was the power to alter form. The most eldritch among foxes could turn (or so her grandmother would claim in that musical croak that was her storytelling voice) into human beings. The they would creep into the lives of lonely and impressionable souls and offer them long-sought affection.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Trees
“...it's survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the biggest.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Trees
“The proposal thus surmounted, it had seemed to him that the hard work was over, and that all that remained was to live out their lives in wedded bliss.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Trees
“Sometimes, just when she thought Seb was made out of wires and circuit boards, he came up with ideas so romantic that she wanted to throw her arms around him and bury a kiss in his hair. Were he only her little boy again, the one he had been not so many years ago, she would have done so there and then.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Trees
“You can’t wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Trees
“A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie. One forty-something client told me his vision, formulated by his younger self: “I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine.” That’s not a plan. That’s a travel poster. After eight margaritas, you’re fit only to await the hangover. After three weeks of margarita-filled days, if you have any sense, you’re bored stiff and self-disgusted. In a year, or less, you’re pathetic. It’s just not a sustainable approach to later life. This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom: government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, quote from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'
He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something.”
― Siri Hustvedt, quote from The Blindfold
“All of life is a contest. The weak against the strong - the stupid against the clever - the honest against the dishonest.”
― Betty MacDonald, quote from Nancy and Plum
“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both.”
― Ayn Rand, quote from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
“Fern’s eyes as “the unpleasant deformity.”
― quote from The Anybodies
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.
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