“It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“Do you write novels?" I said.
"Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion... even God."
"It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor."
"Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“If a situation requires swearing to God it is — by definition — extreme.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you’re walking out of the theater you can’t remember anything at all about your own life.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“Find yourself a place in the universe,' she said, 'a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Take the right picture and a man will walk into it. If you can bear him even a little, then for a while let him stay.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Parable of the Talents
“How two people can be so completely in sync and so completely clueless about each other at the same time is absolutely beyond my ability to comprehend.”
― Susan Bischoff, quote from Heroes 'Til Curfew
“Despite the rocky start, I wound up enjoying a beautiful day on the ranch with Marlboro Man and his parents. I didn’t ride a horse--my legs were still shaky from my near-murder of his mother earlier in the day--but I did get to watch Marlboro Man ride his loyal horse Blue as I rode alongside him in a feed truck with one of the cowboys, who gifted me right off the bat with an ice-cold Dr. Pepper. I felt welcome on the ranch that day, felt at home, and before long the memory of my collision with a gravel ditch became but a faint memory--that is, when Marlboro Man wasn’t romantically whispering sweet nothings like “Drive much?” softly into my ear. And when the day of work came to an end, I felt I knew Marlboro Man just a little better.
As the four of us rode away from the pens together, we passed the sad sight of my Toyota Camry resting crookedly in the ditch where it had met its fate. “I’ll run you home, Ree,” Marlboro Man said.
“No, no…just stop here,” I insisted, trying my darnedest to appear strong and independent. “I’ll bet I can get it going.” Everyone in the pickup burst into hysterical laughter. I wouldn’t be driving myself anywhere for a while.”
― Ree Drummond, quote from The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels
“Often, after extinguishing the oil lamp in our house on stilts, we would lie on our beds and smoke in the dark. Book titles poured from our lips, the mysterious and exotic names evoking unknown worlds. It was like Tibetan incense, where you need only say the name, Zang Xiang, to smell the subtle, refined fragrance and to see the joss sticks sweating beads of scented moisture which, in the lamplight, resemble drops of liquid gold.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
“nationalism will always produce at least one war each generation. It has done in the past, and I suppose we can rely on it to do the same in the future.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
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.