“Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.”
― David Brin, quote from The Uplift War
“But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.”
― David Brin, quote from The Uplift War
“Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben”
― David Brin, quote from The Uplift War
“The best means to an end are not always those that appear most direct.”
― David Brin, quote from The Uplift War
“If only I had a decent sense of humor Ah, well. Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.”
― David Brin, quote from The Uplift War
“My dear girl, you don't consent to an abduction! You consent to an elopement, and I knew you wouldn't do that.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Black Sheep
“There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from All of Us: The Collected Poems
“As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.
The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.”
― Jane Jacobs, quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities
“The closer Finn`s island come to extinction, the more I wandered back in my mind to the lives that come before us, the huts and the houses, the remains of animals and clothing, the coins and the latrines and cooking pots, the messages from the past left in bones and kitchen dumps. And the people.
Sometimes I thought about the content of those lives, the intangible things that leave no fossils and no marks, no history. Would people from the future excavate traces of passion? Of hope, disappointment, despair? Or would the entire human race end up drowned and forgotten, buried under waves of melting ice, with no on left to dig us up or wonder at what was or what might have been?”
― Meg Rosoff, quote from What I Was
“After living at sea for twenty years or more, the female loggerhead returns to the beach of her birth to nest. She travels hundreds of miles through the Atlantic, her three-hundred-pound, eddish-brown carapace filled with hundreds of fertile eggs.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
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.