“This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
“Those are the most monotonous fuckin' crickets I ever heard in my life.”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
“When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
“Austin: "Well it is like salvation sort of. I mean the smell. I love the smell of toast. And the sun's coming up. It makes me feel like anything's possible. Y'know?”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
“There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
“You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
“Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.”
― Bruno Schulz, quote from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
“When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Among believers, a supernatural authority is an ideal guarantor of cooperation, because supernatural beings can be omniscient and omnipotent, guaranteeing maximal rewards for cooperativeness and maximal punishments for uncooperativeness. As David Sloan Wilson has argued, religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The idea that respect for God and being a good cooperator are related is not new, of course. Believers have long been, and continue to be, wary of people who are not “God-fearing.” From”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
“The development of willpower -I will, I won't and I want- may define what it means to be human.”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
“When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream.
A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy.
I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
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.