“We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“...You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“Some people have a gift for making you feel okay, just by the fact of their presence.”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“Tragedy, in its full and life-altering form, happened to other people.”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“I had never really thought of children as people, just as mysterious and needy creatures on their way to something greater.”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“56 percent of learned information is forgotten within an hour of being encoded. By the time one day has passed, another 10 percent is gone. A month after the information is learned, 80 percent of it has vanished. How”
― Michelle Richmond, quote from The Year of Fog
“Call me a pussy, but I swear to God she’s the only air my body can breathe. Fuck if she’s not everything I need and nothing that I deserve.”
― K. Bromberg, quote from Crashed
“The most perfect life develops as a circle, and terminates in its beginning, making it impossible to say, This is the commencement, that the end.”
― Lew Wallace, quote from Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
“Někdy si ráda představuju, že bydlím s přízraky. Ne s těmi ze své minulosti - v takové nevěřím -, ale s průhlednými kusy myšlenek a knih visícími ve vzduchu jako hedvábné loutky.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y
“But now that so much is changing, is it not up to us to change? Could we not try to evolve just a little, and gradually take upon ourselves our share in the labour of love? We have been spared all of its toil, and so it has slipped in among our amusements, as a scrap of genuine lace will occasionally fall into a child's toy-box, and give pleasure, and cease to give pleasure, and at lengthe lie there among broken and dismembered things, worse than all the rest. We have been spoiled by easy gratification, like all dilettantes, and are held to be masters. But what if we despised out successes? What if we began to learn, from the very start, the labour of love that has always been done for us? What if we were to go and become beginners, now that so much is changing?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
“They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride
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.