“You don't really know someone until you see them in the dark.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“They both carried a million cracks beneath the skin. Even under the stark light of the fluorescents, it was hard to see which of them was more broken. But for the first time, she felt like she had to vanquish her mental illness not for herself but for someone else. Because she was broken with him, and if she fixed herself, maybe she could make him a little less broken, too.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“After I flay the skin from your body, I'm going to dye it and sew it into a handbag. Special order from your momma.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Love and hate are closely related expressions of the same intensity. Both require passion, and neither follows logic.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“He tipped her a crooked smile, made of sugar and shit.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Sometimes you have to step back to open the door.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Separation from people hadn't cured her need to please. She longed to lift the hem of isolation, look into eyes full of acceptance, and see in them the reflection of a woman who didn't give a rat's ass.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Her lips slid into a foxy grin. “I made little Van voodoo dolls and stabbed them with toothpicks.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Her naiveté would be the first thing vanquished by the hard, heavy weight between his legs.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“I'm the inescapable curse that caught you when you opened your door.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Eliminating the toxicity in your life is not a failure. It's curative and courageous and never, ever easy.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“I'm sorry"
Whatever she heard in his voice, perhaps the reedy vulnerability in his otherwise controlled tone, brought her hands out from beneath him to grip his jaw and guide his face into light.
She stared up at him for a long, terrifying moment, her eyes searching, her lips rolling together. Then her fingers moved to his temples, combing through the hair over his ears, tenderly, lovingly, in a way he didn't deserve. Her gaze didn't waver from his as she swallowed. "I will never forget. But maybe someday, I might be able to forgive.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“I'd like to make you an offer.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“Fuck him, but he wanted to be her security, her anchor, her fucking everything. Not as her captor but as her lover.”
― Pam Godwin, quote from Vanquish
“We've spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail, Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.
In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.
You should be interested! Such a quest serves God's cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?
Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what different would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.
But suppose you could show me one "sin," one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.
Show me a single "sin."
One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.
"Evil" is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone's either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.
God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn't be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha, I'd shake his hand like a long-lost friend.
The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no "evil" involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the "evil" come in?
There I was forty-five years old and I didn't know whether there was "evil" in the world.”
― Walker Percy, quote from Lancelot
“I opened the show with this line: "I have decided to give the greatest performance of my life! Oh, wait, sorry, that's tomorrow night.”
― Steve Martin, quote from Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
“Although we suffer horribly still there is peace in our souls”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar
“Your strength is the strength of stones. Suddenly,”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story—we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Cloudsplitter
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.