Quotes from The Twenty-One Balloons

180 pages

Rating: (19.4K votes)


“Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons


“The best way of travel, however, if you aren't in any hurry at all, if you don't care where you are going, if you don't like to use your legs, if you don't want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons


“It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons


“That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care.”
― quote from The Twenty-One Balloons


Popular quotes

“I would think wolves would prefer spicy things. It’s bears that crave sweets.” “We don’t like spicy food. Once we found red fang-shaped fruit among the cargo of a shipwreck. We ate it and regretted it loud and long!” “Ah, hot peppers. Expensive, those.” “We dunked our heads in the river and decided humans were terrifying indeed,” said Holo with a chuckle, enjoying the memory for a moment as she gazed at the stalls.”
― Isuna Hasekura, quote from Spice & Wolf, Vol. 01


“It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Rule of the Bone


“He felt like someone going to a whorehouse for the first time.”
― Harry Mulisch, quote from The Assault


“But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.”
― Melanie Benjamin, quote from Alice I Have Been


“Thanks to my ridiculous, sometimes tragic, and always unsteady upbringing, I was given the gift of bone-crushing insecurity. One thing you’ll notice about people with mental problems is constant self-absorbation. I think that’s because it’s such a struggle just to be who they are, so they have a hard time getting past it.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know


Interesting books

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
(87.6K)
American Sniper: The...
by Chris Kyle
The Book of Life
(84.9K)
The Book of Life
by Deborah Harkness
Danse Macabre
(40.2K)
Danse Macabre
by Laurell K. Hamilton
Frostbitten
(21K)
Frostbitten
by Kelley Armstrong
Boundless
(40.3K)
Boundless
by Cynthia Hand
The Shadow of the Torturer
(17.6K)
The Shadow of the To...
by Gene Wolfe

About BookQuoters

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.