“Trying to fulfill earthly desires was like carrying water to the sea; a never- ending task, and an ultimately useless one.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“Lead me into all misfortune. Only by that path can I transform the negative into the positive.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“He had done the right thing and that was what counted. That was the best you could do in life. How others took it was beyond his control.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“people were like icebergs--most of what really went on, especially the ugliness, was submerged”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“a walther ppk. you're a james bond fan, i imagine....”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“The point of a cruise ship is the cruise itself. But an ocean liner’s job is to transport people on a schedule. The”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Wheel of Darkness
“and he, Hugh Person....began to undress her in the motels of his mind”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Transparent Things
“In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, quote from Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
“There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it.”
― Josephine Hart, quote from Damage
“Love! love!.. thou art never to be reconciled with discretion!”
― Antoine François Prévost, quote from Manon Lescaut
“Dan Lynch was chuckling, his hand around his small glass. 'I remember Billy saying that AA was a Protestant thing when you came right down to it. Started by a bunch of Protestants. He said he didn't like the chummy way some of them were always calling Our Lord by his first name. I drove him to the first meeting and waited to take him home, 'cause Maeve didn't want him driving, and when he came out he said you could tell who the Catholics were because they'd all been bowing their heads every ten seconds while the Protestants bantered on about Jesus, Jesus Jesus.'
(And sure enough, up and down our stretch of table, heads bobbed at the name.)”
― Alice McDermott, quote from Charming Billy
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.