Quotes from Unteachable

“...You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you'll lose it someday. We lose everything. If you're trying to avoid loss, there's no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends." His fingers curl around mine. "That's all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“You can call it love, or you can call it freefall. They're pretty much the same thing.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known your whole life.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one's letting me in on the secret.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“I respect people who get nerdy as fuck about something they love”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you're gorgeous, you're fearless and unpredictable, you're a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“I can't hold on to you. You're like a shooting star. Just a trail of fire in my hands.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“That's another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they're true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“There's something so terrible about wanting something you've already had. You know exactly what you're missing. Your body knows precisely how to shape itself around the ache, the hollowness that wants to be filled”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“That is all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“People know their feelings much sooner than they consciously accept them.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“The only way to cure an obsession is to become obsessed with something else.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“...The thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Grow up. This is real. The world is ugly and nasty and fucked up, and so are we.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul and all that jazz.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Why did everything beautiful come from pain?”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Are you in love with him?”
I rolled my head on the plank to look at Wesley.
“I don’t think I know what being in love is yet. But this is different than anything I’ve ever felt.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Remember when you thought I was jumping off to kill myself?”
He winced.
“It’s like that,” I said.
“But no one catches you. You’re just hanging over infinity.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“This is ridiculous," I said, trying to laugh it off. "I never cry at movies."

"Because you've never been in love," he said.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Don’t come here to fuck with my head and play games. You don’t test someone’s love by leaving them.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it’s piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it’s ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it’ll ever see it. On the day I die, it’ll be calculating what to have for dinner as it bombards itself with pain signals from my amputated legs or my clocked-out heart.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“I'm not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“I can’t be your manic pixie dream girl. I can’t be the girl who teaches you how to open your heart and embrace life and all that bullshit, because I’m trying to figure out how to do that myself. I need a manic pixie dream boy of my own.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Nobody knows how to be a grown-up. We're all just pretending for each other.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“That’s how you know someone loves you. When they want you to be happy even in the part of your life they’ll never see. But right then I was too stuck in the moment, in the visceral pleasure of it all.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“You're so alive, Maise. You're so here, so present in the moment. You've taught me that happiness is possible now, not in some distant future. You'll scale a mountain without a second thought, face your fears, throw yourself into danger, and you're not reckless but bold, proud. You have a lion's heart. You're not afraid to live.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“Our gazes struck like flint and steel. And I realized that gunsmoke smell wasn’t ozone. It was us. We burned.”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

“That was what we'd finally been forced to confront: if our relationship was based on forbiddenness, what would happen when it was no longer forbidden?”
― Leah Raeder, quote from Unteachable

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Popular quotes

“White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“Words are the worst kind of ammunition. Physical pain fades in time, but bullets of cruelty forever penetrate the soul.”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Soul

“We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.”
Steve kept pacing around the living room, talking about all the advantages of having kids--how I’d been so passionate about carrying on with the family business back in Oregon, and how he felt the same way about the zoo. He just knew our kids would feel the same too.
I said, “You know, there’s no guarantee that we won’t have a son who grows up to be a shoe salesman in Malaysia.”
“Come off the grass,” Steve said. “Any kid of ours is going to be a wildlife warrior.”
I thought of the whale calves following their mamas below the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight and prepared myself for a new adventure with Steve, maybe the greatest adventure of all.”
― Terri Irwin, quote from Steve & Me

“Gotta have my make up, in case I run into Joey and he wants to beat the shit out of me. Gotta look my best! Maybe he'll punch me repeatedly in the kidneys and the stomach so it doesn't mark up my face. He's so thoughtful!”
― George Carlin, quote from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

“Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention.”
― Shirley Hazzard, quote from The Transit of Venus

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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.