“Everything was temporary; she understood that now. All of this was temporary. It would all be snatched away. It was all on loan. Even the people we love. They were all on loan. One day you see their face across a rickety table or you pass them hurrying from here to there, or you see them leave you in your bed, and their profile passes you by...and you don't know...your thoughts somewhere else. And then they are snatched away forever and you did not know to say goodbye. You did not know.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“But then it came to her…just change your mind about it. About everything. Shit. That was it. "What an idiot she was. It was that simple. Just decide to stop struggling and embrace it all as a gift. And in a single second, everything is different.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“Life’s going to do that to you missy. Gonna upset your wagon, not just once but many times. And you got to choose who’s sitting next to you. Someone you can trust…or not.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“Friendship, true friendship is a curious dance. Why does one recognize and embrace one soul and yet not another. What is that? That something unspoken. Perhaps it is a long ago remembrance of another time, another place, those same familiar eyes shining out. Always we are searching for those recognizable eyes…so that we might at last be recognized ourselves.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“That the woman in her had died in anguish and a vengeful man had been born in her place apparently brooked no notice of the universe. Nor had the universe even blinked in the absorption into itself of her tragedy.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“Here’s to being single…drinking doubles…and seeing triple!”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“reminded me of a quote by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—“life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind could invent.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“as Shakespeare wrote, “What a piece of work is a man…”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“read aloud from Emerson: Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an a-po-lo-gy…”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“It’s true that we’re all children disguised as adults…When age and illness embrace our body…when disease and pain overcome, our eternal youth within begins raging, stamping, praying. Please dear God who lays me down to sleep…an awful mistake has been made…I was just now learning to feel safe beneath this fragile skin, trust within this prison cell. Just now my eyes are open to the world…Just now I feel the earth beneath my feet.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“It was so strange, she thought, these moments we pray for; they happen so quick and then they’re gone. “Just like that,” Charley said out loud.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
“First class passengers, stay where you are,” she yelled. “Second class, get out and walk. Third class, get down and push.”
― Karen Kondazian, quote from The Whip
Karen Kondazian
Born place: in Boston, Mass., The United States
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“The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Holy the Firm
“Geist und Tat. Spirit and Action.”
― Susan Campbell Bartoletti, quote from The Boy Who Dared
“يقول شوبنهاور: إن كل الملاحم التمثيلية لا يسعها إلا أن تصوّر نزاعاً وجهداً وقتالاً من أجل السعادة ولكنها لا تحتمل السعادة نفسها أبداً. وهي تسير بأبطالها إلى آلاف المخاطر والمصاعب للوصول إلى الهدف المنشود، وبمجرد أن يبلغ هؤلاء الأبطال أهدافهم تسارع القصة إلى إسدال الستار إذ لم يعد لها شيء بعد ذلك لتظهره سوى أن الهدف اللامع البرّاق الذي توقع البطل أن يجد فيه السعادة قد خيّب أمله، وأنه لم يكن بعد بلوغه أسعد حالاً منه قبل بلوغه.”
― Will Durant, quote from The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
“He said the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, "I must wash my hair." When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as a girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair. I knew if I showed it to my mother she would say, "Oh it is just that maddening male nonsense, women have no brains." That would not convince me; surely a New York psychiatrist must know. And women like my mother were in the minority, I could see that. Moreover I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn't be a choice.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Lives of Girls and Women
“Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy.”
― Jack Weatherford, quote from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
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Gut SymmetriesBookQuoters 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.
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