“His hands are on my back, in my hair, on my hips. His fingers move like I'm Braille, like he's trying to read me just by touching me.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“But in the mouth of Mother Nature's fury, Ethan's totally at ease, and I wonder if it's because he's studied weather for years, or because he figured out a long time ago that the things that really hurt you don't usually fall from the sky.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“I can click my heels together all I want, but there's just no place to go.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“There’s a thin line between saving someone and helping them destroy themselves”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“You don't go through things with people and not love them for it. It's like those guys in the army who fight in muddy trenches and drag each other out of harm's way and are blood brothers for life because of it all. Only in our case, my mom and I face eviction notices and power shutoffs together.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“Thigh on thigh, chest on chest, we're so close, there's not even night between us.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“Max's lips part slightly, and mine do the same. His tongue inside my mouth makes fireworks of color burst behind my closed eyelids. We explore and taste each other again and again, until Max finally pulls away. I want more-- I think I could survive on nothing but his mouth for weeks--but I try not to let it show too much.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."
Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.
With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
I know how they make up my thoughts.
These thoughts.”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“Every key belongs to a lock, and every lock contains a secret. My mind churns for the truth that you hold. Why are you here? I never desired this for you, yet I am curious to know. Is this idle gaud the answer I seek, or is it merely the old memory of a dream I thought I once lived?”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Logically, when the amygdala wants to mobilize a behavior—say, fleeing—it talks to the frontal cortex, seeking its executive approval. But if sufficiently aroused, the amygdala talks directly to subcortical, reflexive motor pathways. Again, there’s a trade-off—increased speed by by-passing the cortex, but decreased accuracy. Thus the input shortcut may prompt you to see the cell phone as a gun. And the output shortcut may prompt you to pull a trigger before you consciously mean to.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“It's like an addiction, one I battle every day. It appeared at first drink. I was becoming the very thing I feared---my father's son. I wanted to be as far away from that Threshold as possible. I swore I'd never take another sip, no matter how crazy it made me. No matter how much it called to me. Resisting became easier with time.”
― Sara Ella, quote from Unblemished
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.