Quotes from The Whispering Swarm

“We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.”
― Michael Moorcock, quote from The Whispering Swarm

“He was talking about hire purchase. precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes through a place a cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bough and sold.”
― Michael Moorcock, quote from The Whispering Swarm

“Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future.”
― Michael Moorcock, quote from The Whispering Swarm

“They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it.”
― Michael Moorcock, quote from The Whispering Swarm

“Then Lu Wing entered, no longer in chauffeur’s uniform but wearing a high-buttoned, deep blue silk tunic, an entourage of smooth, modern men of south China at his heels, ready, I heard him say, to do any further work required of them. The conversation turned to a more distant moment when his father died and he would claim the crown of the Wing emirates, to rule over a subcontinent and its colonies again. Sending his men off, he said, upon their errands and to visit their many relatives in Limehouse, Lu Wing leaned against the bar, as relaxed as he had probably been during his student days at Oxford.”
― Michael Moorcock, quote from The Whispering Swarm

“Memory is the foundation of identity. Through our sense of identity, we act. We determine our moral judgements. We rewrite our own memories, of course, all the time. We create fresh narratives to use in our survival. We agree on fresh histories enabling us to take action. It is part of what makes us such flawed creatures. Creatures of such narrative fiction creating cause and effect.”
― Michael Moorcock, quote from The Whispering Swarm

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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.