“Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you simply didn't know it.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“I can see the years that Thomas and I have had together, the fragility of that life. The creation of a marriage, of a family, not because it has been ordained or is meant to be, but because we have simply made it happen. We have done this thing, and then that thing, and then that thing, and I have come to think of our years together as a tightly knotted fisherman’s net; not perfectly made perhaps, but so well knit I would have said it could never have been unraveled. During”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Weight of Water
“The door from the next room suddenly opened with a timid, quiet creak, as if thus announcing the entrance of a very insignificant person...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Double
“One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.”
― Allan Bloom, quote from The Closing of the American Mind
“Surely, somewhere in the back of Bulfinch, in a part Lillian had not gotten to, there is an obscure (abstruse, arcane, shadowy, and even hidden) version of Proserpine in he Underworld in which a tired Jewish Ceres schleps through the outskirts of Tartarus, an ugly village of tired whores who must double as laundresses and barbers, a couple of saloons, a nearly empty five-and-dime, and people too poor to pull up stakes. In this version, Ceres looks all over town for her Proserpine, who crossed the River Cyane in a pretty sailboat with Pluto, having had the good sense to come to an understanding with the king early on. Pluto and Proserpine picnic in a charming park, twinkling lights overhead and handsome wide benches like the ones in Central Park. When Ceres comes, tripping a little on her hem as she walks through the soft grass, muttering and trying to yank Proserpine to her feet so they can start the long trip home to Enna and daylight (which has lost much of its luster, now that Proserpine is queen of all she surveys), the girl does not jump up at the sight of her mother, but takes her time handing out the sandwiches and pours cups of sweetened tea for the three of them. She lays a nicely ironed napkin in her lap and another in the lap of her new husband, the king. Proserpine does not eat the pomegranate seeds by mistake, or in a moment of desperate hunger, or fright, or misunderstanding. She takes the pomegranate slice out of her husband’s dark and glittering hand and pulls the seeds into her open, laughing mouth; she eats only six seeds because her mother knocks it out of her hand before she can swallow the whole sparkling red cluster.
“We have to get home,” Ceres says.
“I am home,” her daughter says.”
― Amy Bloom, quote from Away
“I want lots and lots of sex."
"You really are the woman of my dreams."
"First round, wet shower sex, after we scrape off a few layers of the Alaskan tundra, then a short and satisfying lunch break. Then a second round of make-the-mattress-sing sex."
"I feel a tear of gratitude and awe forming in the corner of my eyes. Don't think less of me.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Chasing Fire
“We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
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.