“The funny thing about armor is that it doesn't just keep other people out. It keeps us in. We build it up around us, not realizing that we're trapping ourselves.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“It’s okay to not be okay,” she says. “When you’ve been through things—whatever those things are—and you don’t allow yourself to not be okay, then you only make it worse. Our problems will tear us apart if we try to ignore them. They demand attention because they need it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“You can't be two people. You end up being neither.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Having something and losing it, it's so much crueler than never having had it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Caring about someone is scary, Mac. I know. Especially when you’ve lost people. It’s easy to think it’s not worth it. It’s easy to think life will hurt less if you don’t. But it’s not life unless you care about it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“I am not afraid of nightmares, because mine came true and I lived through them.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“He leans in, resting his weathered hand on the bed. "Treat all the bad things like dreams, Kenzie. That way, no matter how scary or dark they get, you just have to survive until you wake up.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“And when he presses his lips into the curve of my throat, I can feel his tears on my skin.
“You are an idiot,” I say, even as I guide his face and mouth to mine. I kiss him, not gently, but desperately. Desperately, because he’s worth it—because life is terrifying and short and I don’t know what will happen. All I know is that here and now, I am still alive, and I want to be with Wesley Ayers. Here and now I want to feel his arms wrapped around me. I want to feel his lips on mine. I want to feel his life tangling with mine. Here and now is all we have, and I want to make it worth whatever happens next.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Da used to say that lies were easy, but trust was hard. Trust is like faith: it can turn people into believers, but every time it's lost, trust becomes harder and harder to win back.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Doubt is like a current you have to swim against, one that saps your strength.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“WESLEY AYERS is the stranger in the halls of the Coronado. He is the Keeper in the garden who shares my secret. He is the boy who reads me books. He is the one who teaches me how to touch.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Everything that rises will fall. Empires, societies, governments. None of them lasts forever. Why? Because even though they are the products of change, they become resistant to change. The longer a society survives, the more it clings to its power, and the more it resists progress. The more it resists progress- resists change- the more its ciizens demand it. In response, the society tighten its grip, desperate to maintain control. It's afraid of losing its hold.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“I have to wonder if he has masks he wears, too. Maybe we all do.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“But the fact is, dreams catch us with our armor off.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books. Each body has a story to tell...”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Smiling is the worst thing you can do if you want the world to think you're okay when you're not. Some people can't help it - it's like a tic, a tell - and others do it on purpose, thinking people will buy whatever they're selling if it comes with a flash of teeth. But the truth is, smiling only makes a lie harder to pass off. It's like a giant crack in the front of a mask.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“People are made up of so many small details. Some—like the smell of cookies baking—we can recreate. Or at least try.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“The shared secret of our second lives hangs between us, not like a weight, but like a lifeline.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“The worse thing you can do in a fight is stop moving. When someone attacks, they create force, movement, momentum, but you'll be okay as long as you can see and feel the direction of that force and travel with it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“The world isn’t that black-and-white, is it? It doesn’t all boil down to with or against. Some of us just want to stay alive.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Da thought of people as books to be read, but I've always thought of them more as formulas- full of variables, but always the sum of their parts.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“He used to tell me there were no bad dreams. Just dreams. That when we call them good or bad, we give importance to them. I know that doesn't make it better, Mac. I know it's easy to talk like that when you're awake. But the fact is, dreams catch us with our armor off.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“There have been times when I've wavered. When I thought maybe I wanted to be normal. But the thing is, what we do, it's in our blood. It's who we are. Normal wouldn't fit us, even if we wanted to wear it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Wesley's touch lingers on my skin. His music echoes through my head. I remind myself as I scrub my skin that we are both liars and con artists. That we will always have secrets, some that bind us and some that cut between us, slicing us into pieces.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Lies are easy, but trust is hard. Trust is like faith: it can turn people into believers, but every time it's lost, trust becomes harder and harder to win back. And doubt, Da warned, is like a current you have to swim against, one that saps your strength.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Wes hits the table. "You broke into a crime scene without me?"
"Be glad, Wes, or we would have both been caught."
"We're a team, Mac. You don't go committing crimes without your partner in crime. Besides, if I'd been with you, we probably wouldn't have been caught. I could have stood at the door and made wild bird sounds or something when the cops came back. And if we did get caught, or mugshots would look fabulous.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Trust is like faith: it can turn people into believers, but every time it's lost, trust becomes harder and harder to win back”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“I never liked bad weather. Not until I met you.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Stare too long at anything and you start to wonder. And where does wondering get you? Nowhere good.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Unbound
“Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become.”
― Anna Godbersen, quote from Splendor
“Postwar America would bear no more similarity to prewar America than the Restoration Monarchy bore to Revolutionary France; what would emerge would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta—and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media … it was so clear! Why couldn’t the dunderheads see it? Whoever could see it—whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of its boiling crest—would hold the future securely in his fine right hand”
― Anton Myrer, quote from Once An Eagle
“The survivor gets to tell the story.”
― Nancy Werlin, quote from The Rules of Survival
“The living do not see eternity, just as they don't see Everlost, but they sense both in ways that they don't even know. They don't feel the Everlost barrier set across the Mississippi River, and yet no one had ever dared to draw city boundaries that straddle both sides of its waters. The living do not see Afterlights, and yet everyone has had times when they've felt a presence near them - sometimes comforting, sometimes not - but always strong enough to make one turn around and look over one's shoulder.”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from Everwild
“They write songs about California girls for a reason.”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn't Have)
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.