“This is our condition . We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not
“…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not
“But now . . . he was not yet at the age, like his father, when life shifts to past tense, when what is becomes what was and all the other verbs defining your existence go slumping into the preterite, crusted with apophonic alternations (I sing calcifying into I sang), and you can do nothing but marvel or wince at the irredeemable, irreversible arc of it—not yet. On this November night he was fifty-four years old. By no means, he told himself, was he beyond the future tense. But he could feel the past tense gaining on him, like the cold seeping into his back and dusting his face. He licked it off his lips and stood up. He had work to do.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not
“But then he decided it wasn’t an irony, it was merely the broken gears of time, or the way life can feed you when you’re full (youth) and starve you when you’re hungry (midlife).”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not
“Alexis was at that age, seventeen, when mothers come into view as tyrants or imbeciles or both.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not
“This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not
“...it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.”
― Richard Wright, quote from Black Boy
“What if I don't want to be friends with you?" he challenged, grinning again, staring directly into my eyes. Obviously taking me seriously was an impossibility for Evan.
Despite not being able to breathe, I connected with his taunting gaze and refused to look away. "Then we won't be friends," I said flatly.
"What if I want to be more than friends?”
― Rebecca Donovan, quote from Reason to Breathe
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Mere Christianity
“You’re smiling again,” Regina said. “I was just thinking about how much I love you both,” Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother’s eyes that might have been tears. They really believed it. The shitters. •”
― Stephen King, quote from Christine
“I grab his face an' kiss him on the lips. Then I step back. We stare at each other. All the air gits sucked outta the tunnel. The heartstone burns into my skin. The blood pounds in my ears.
Yer timin stinks, he says.”
― Moira Young, quote from Blood Red Road
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.