“Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn't exist. It's that simple, and we can't afford to ignore them, anymore than I can afford to neglect my precious wife--nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all.
Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“in the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“You understand... just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“The Panama Canal,' says Abdiel Perez, 'is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth--one that nature is trying to heal.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors.
"There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“In recent years, a green burial movement has protested formaldehyde, which oxidizes to formic acid, the toxic in fire ants and bee stingers, as yet one more poison to leach into water tables: careless people, polluting even from the tomb.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Puszcza, an old Polish word, means “forest primeval.” Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Białowieża Puszcza contain Europe’s last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“In New York, the European starling—now a ubiquitous avian pest from Alaska to Mexico—was introduced because someone thought the city would be more cultured if Central Park were home to each bird mentioned in Shakespeare.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Back above ground, like robotic versions of the mosques and minarets that grace the shores of Istanbul's Bosphorus, Houston’s petroscape of domed white tanks and silver fractioning towers spreads along the banks of its Ship Channel.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Once, we built structures entirely from the most durable substances we knew: granite block, for instance. The results are still around today to admire, but we don’t often emulate them, because quarrying, cutting, transporting, and fitting stone require a patience we no longer possess. No one since the likes of Antoni Gaudí, who began Barcelona’s yet-unfinished Sagrada Familia basilica in 1880, contemplates investing in construction that our great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren will complete 250 years hence. Nor, absent the availability of a few thousand slaves, is it cheap, especially compared to another Roman innovation: concrete.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings. Without garbage, rats starved or became lunch for the raptors nesting in burnt-out skyscrapers.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“When we're down to eating our ancestors," she asked, "what is left?”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“Arsenic turned out to work even better, and was cheaper. Until it was banned in the 1890s, it was used widely, and heavy arsenic levels are sometimes a problem for archaeologists examining some old U.S. graveyards. What they generally find is that the bodies decomposed anyway, but the arsenic stayed.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“In 1955, a little more than four years after leaving a TV studio in Hollywood, signals bearing the first sound and images of the I Love Lucy show passed Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. A half-century later, a scene with Lucy disguised as a clown sneaking into Ricky’s Tropicana Night Club was 50-plus light-years, or about 300 trillion miles, away. Since the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across and 1,000 light-years thick, and our solar system is near the middle of the galactic plane, this means in about AD 2450 the expanding sphere of radio waves bearing Lucy, Ricky, and their neighbors the Mertzes will emerge from the top and bottom of our galaxy and enter intergalactic space.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“In the 1930s, with no computers to precisely calculate tolerances of construction materials, cautious engineers simply heaped on excess mass and redundancy. “We’re living off the overcapacity of our forefathers.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
“IT IS STARTLING to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.”
― Alan Weisman, quote from The World Without Us
Alan Weisman
Born place: The United States
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“I'm trying to say that I think doing what you feel can't always be easy, but at least you're being true to yourself.”
― Erin Bowman, quote from Taken
“Not for the first time, I wonder if Drew Evans is the devil—or a close relation. I can picture him offering the fastingChrist a loaf of bread and making it sound completely acceptable for him to take a big ole bite out of it.”
― Emma Chase, quote from Overruled
“Należymy do gatunku składającego słowa jak ryba ikrę, produkujemy więcej kultury, niż jesteśmy w stanie przetrawić. W ciągu ostatnich lat pedantycznie zwalczaliśmy graffiti na stacjach metra, a jednocześnie wydajemy miliony koron na budowę nowych bibliotek narodowych. Tymczasem zapis pamięci narodowej może przyjąć również formę graffiti. Nietzsche porównał człowieka przejedzonego kulturą do węża, który połknął zająca, a teraz drzemie w słońcu, nie będą w stanie się ruszyć. Czas epigramatów już minął. Na przystani w Bryggen w Bergen znaleziono niewielki kawałeczek drewna z takim oto napisem runicznym: Ingebjørg kochała mnie, kiedy byłem w Stavanger. Fakt ten musiał wywrzeć pewne wrażenie na autorze napisu, podobnie zresztą jak na czytelniku, żyjącym osiemset czy dziewięćset lat później. Dzisiaj oszczędny w słowach autor, chcąc uwiecznić jedną schadzkę z Ingebjørg, dorzuciłby do pamięci potomnych czerystustronicową powieść. Albo też zadręczyłby życie swoim współczesnym wpadającymi w ucho popularnymi piosenkami w stylu 'Nie ma jak z Ingebjørg, nie ma jak z Ingebjørg'. Paradoks polega na tym, że gdyby przez wszystkie osiemset lat napisano równie wiele powieści, jak w latach siedemdziesiątych, to nikt z nas nie byłby w stanie przebrnąć przez tak obfitą tradycję piśmiennictwa i nie dotarłby do prostej, lecz przyjemnej historii o Ingebjørg. (...) Namiętna historia miłośna została odarta ze wszystkiego aż do kości, lecz mimo to niesie za sobą mnóstwo konotacji. Ponadto pewnych rzeczy czytelnik może się domyślić. Dostał do ręki coś, nad czym dalej może pracować jego wyobraźnia. Po czterystustronicowej powieści trudno jest samemu coś wymyślić.”
― Jostein Gaarder, quote from The Ringmaster's Daughter
“She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read. Wonderful luck that was, Mrs. Oliver thought to herself.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Elephants Can Remember
“Bloodchild" is my pregnant man story.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Bloodchild and Other Stories
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Deep WizardryBookQuoters 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.
