“Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall.
Piper”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“Sometimes things need to get broken”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“My mother taught me how to find grace in wreckage. She taught me not how to reassemble, but how to rearrange. The stained-glass pictures she made were certain evidence that things can be broken and put back together, and that the mended thing will be more beautiful than the original.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“That's the way with sentimental things: it's the memory the junk conjures that's valuable, not the junk itself.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“كيف نالت الدراجة
المهجورة حريتها؟
هل ينفع الملح والسكر
في بناء برج أبيض؟
هل صحيح أنّ الأحلام
في قرية النمل واجب؟
هل تعلم ماذا تتأمّل الأرض في الخريف؟”
― Pablo Neruda, quote from The Book of Questions
“There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman's tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, 'There there,' in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dexter By Design
“Nature is a strong brand name. Everybody knew that. First thing, Nomenclature 101. Slap Natural on the package, you were golden. Those words on the package promise ease from metropolitan care, modern worries. And out here, if you opened things up, underneath the cellophane, what did you find inside? That fruit has splendid packaging, it has solid consumer awareness and is an animal favorite. Its seeds will be deposited in spoor miles away and its market dominance will increase. Splendid and beautiful petals are great advertising--the insects buzz and hop from all points every weekend to hit this flower-bed mall. Natural selection was market forces. In business, in the woods: what is necessary to the world will last.”
― Colson Whitehead, quote from Apex Hides the Hurt
“The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
― Stanley Kunitz, quote from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz
“After killing the dancer, he dismembered her body, boiled her head in a kitchen pot, and placed bits of her flesh in buckets he then kept in storage facilities. Having cooked her flesh, he then, in an act of grotesque generosity, dispensed some to the homeless in his neighborhood as "meat.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Evil
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.