“A man who has grown up in an orphanage cannot take a dog to the pound.
Even if it is a Chihuahua.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“It didn't take a Harvard economist to figure out that it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who's fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“He always took lateness as being rude. It said to the other person that their time was more valuable than yours.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“In a rare moment of candor, he had once told her that being in a library was like sitting down at a table laid with all his favorite foods but not being able to eat any of them. And he hated himself for it.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“Dr. Monroe and I realized very gradually that drug addiction is a terminal disease. It is a cancer that eats families alive.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“The older sister could have been an overachiever who cast the kind of shadow in which nothing could grow.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“Inside, he had forgotten what it was like to hear a woman’s voice, listen to the sort of complaints that only women could have. Bad haircuts. Rude store clerks. Chipped nails. Men wanted to talk about things: cars, guns, snatch. They didn’t discuss their feelings unless it was anger, and even that didn’t last for long because generally they started doing something about it.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“Will had found out the hard way that it’s nearly impossible to go to sleep with a flatulent Chihuahua sharing your pillow.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“the reason the middle class had it so good was because they expected things to be better. They wouldn’t settle for less than they were worth. They’d just get into their shiny cars and go where they were appreciated. Poor people, on the other hand, were used to just taking what was given to them and being grateful for it.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“Michael swallowed, feeling like he was choking on his grief. “Fifteen,” he said. She’d just had a birthday last week. He’d bought her a stuffed giraffe. “She’s fifteen.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“She glanced down the hallway, but Angie didn’t want to go into the bedrooms. She didn’t want to see where Michael screwed his wife, know that this was the place where he probably beat Gina. Had”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“He wore a watch on his wrist, but only as a cheat to help him differentiate between left and right.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“small woman, maybe five-three on a good day. Her attitude filled the room, and she walked with a swagger that rivaled a bullfighter’s.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“but I met him once and he’s super”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“It didn’t take a Harvard economist to figure out that it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“Amanda was probably in her mid-fifties, a small woman, maybe five-three on a good day. Her attitude filled the room, and she walked with a swagger that rivaled a bullfighter's. She wore a simple diamond ring on her wedding finger, though Will knew she wasn't currently married. She had no children, or perhaps she had eaten them when they were young.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“According to a local news team investigation, response times to emergency calls from Grady averaged around forty-five minutes. An ambulance took even longer.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“Will thought of her time away from work the way he used to think of his schoolteachers crawling into their caves under the school building at night, lulling themselves to sleep with dreams of torturing their students the next day.”
― Karin Slaughter, quote from Triptych
“If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal?
I didn’t know.
What I did know was that I felt less prone to depression and more normal walking through Venice or staring out over the lake in Zurich. At home I wrestled continually with my moods. The black thing inside me gnawed like a rat at my self-esteem and self-confidence. I felt there was a happy person inside me too, who wanted to enjoy life, to be normal, but my feelings of self-loathing and the deep distrust I had towards my father wouldn’t allow that sunny person to come out.
When the black thing had an iron grip on me, I couldn’t even look at my father: Did you do bad things to me when I was little?
Like a line from a song stuck in your brain, the words ran through my head and never once came out of my mouth. Not that I needed to say what was in my mind. I was sure Father could read my thoughts in my moods, in the blank, dead stare of my eyes.
It was hardly surprising that there was always an atmosphere of strain and awkwardness in the house, and the blame was always mine: Alice and her moods, Alice and her anorexia; Alice and her low self-esteem; Alice and her inescapable feelings of loss and emptiness.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists.
What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?
There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.
For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical.
Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“I was a big dreamer and never particularly good at anything--a real dilemma. I wasn't terrible. I was just... okay. If you're terrible, you can write everybody off, like, "I don't know what the hell those idiots are doing?" I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
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.