“We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying. If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“That's the funny thing about doubt." "What do you mean?" "It makes you feel rotten as hell. But if anyone bothered to think about it, it's a symptom of love. It means it matters to you. It's the brain questioning the wisdom of the heart. It doesn't mean the heart doesn't know better all along, it only means the brain doesn't understand how.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“That's the thing about taste: It's rarely shared.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“I had lived and left all the living I'd done in that strange, perfectly sculpted yet empty echo of my life,”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“It was bizarre the way time was like an accordion, and distinct moments that felt so disparate sometimes folded together with a callous symmetry.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“...sometimes editors, we're passionate about certain books... We simply want them to exist, to point to them on a shelf and to tell another person: "Here. Read this." pg 486”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“Together we drank a couple of fingers of bourbon neat, and then he shook my hand in a dignified way and informed me the best lesson he could teach me at this point in my life was self-reliance.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“Between the five of us we finished off a pot of coffee and two packs of cigarettes and fourteen bottles of beer and shared the dim awareness that a small but sturdy union had been formed.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“Back in those days My Old Man was king of what they called three-martini lunch. This meant that in dimly lit steak houses all over Manhattan my father made bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters. That was how it was done. Publishing was a place for men with ferocity and an appetite for life.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“I think it must've been because of Bobby that Rusty came around at first. Rusty was a scrawny, rat-faced dandy of a kid who acquired his nickname by virtue of his rust-coloured hair. I mentioned Bobby was beautiful in a way that even guys who went around with girls noticed and Rusty was not the sort to go around with girls at all and so was even more likely to pay his respects to Bobby's beauty.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“It was always a smart thing if you were going to a party to invite Bobby, because all the prettiest chicks flocked to Bobby and if you were standing next to him it was like they were flocking to you, too.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“The Caravaggio had been one of my favourites; I had taped it to the ceiling over my bed and memorised its shapes and lines, but I had never seen it in colour and hadn't understood all that I was missing. I stared at it with fascination now. It was like seeing a friend you thought you knew and realising there were still a great many secrets you had yet to discover about each other.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“Never agree with a man who insults you.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“We were inverted images of each other in some ways.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“I had the details of that photograph memorised.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“But mostly I married her because it made me heartsick to think of her marrying someone else.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“It's a myth that people who live in cities are naturally more open-minded, more accepting and tolerant of difference. The truth is, whatever people are, be it saints or bigots, they simply are these things, and the city - by smashing all those different kinds of people up against one another - just makes people's tolerance (or lack of it) all that much more pronounced.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“It dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state.”
― Suzanne Rindell, quote from Three-Martini Lunch
“In the end, that is what this book is about. It will show how the makers of processed foods have chosen, time and again, to double down on their efforts to dominate the American diet, gambling that consumers won’t figure them out. It will show how they push ahead, despite their own misgivings. And it will hold them accountable for the social costs that keep climbing even as some of their own say, “Enough already.”
― Michael Moss, quote from Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
“Stop that," she ordered the gorgeous adult panther on the floor while a gorgeous baby panther tried to bite at his arm with tiny panther teeth. "I can't have you being all sexy while Naya's being all adorable.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Allegiance of Honor
“No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
“So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won’t be great. Yes, and I’m fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going home to bed is only that his carriage hasn’t arrived yet. But the carriage is ready . . . farewell!
I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . .
There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . .
But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the baits of passion, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life.
Since then, how many times have I played the role of the ax in the hands of fate! Like an instrument of execution, I fell on the head of doomed martyrs, often without malice, always without regret . . .
My love never brought anyone happiness, because I never sacrificed anything for those I loved: I loved for myself, for my personal pleasure.
I was simply satisfying a strange need of the heart, with greediness, swallowing their feelings, their joys, their suffering—and was never sated. Just as a man, tormented by hunger, goes to sleep in exhaustion and dreams of sumptuous dishes and sparkling wine before him. He devours the airy gifts of his imagination with rapture, and he feels easier. But as soon as he wakes: the dream disappears . . . and all that remains is hunger and despair redoubled!
And, maybe, I will die tomorrow! . . . And not one being on this earth will have ever understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am . . . Some will say “he was a good fellow,” others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other would be wrong.
Given this, does it seem worth the effort to live? And yet, you live, out of curiosity, always wanting something new . . . Amusing and vexing!”
― Mikhail Lermontov, quote from Der Held unserer Zeit: Kaukasische Lebensbilder
“Forget Ryan,' Heidi said dismissively. 'He's a tool.'
'I thought you liked him!'
'I did--until I saw how little convincing he needed from me to cheat on you. And then I realized, Ryan Dano is a tool.”
― Natasha Friend, quote from My Life in Black and White
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.
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