“There's a certain language, a dying language, and I can't remember who speaks it or where in the world they are, but in that language the future is referred to as being behind us. It must be behind us, since we can see the past. We walk backwards, blind, into the future, only knowing where we've already been.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“I know this feeling. It's a familiar one. The feeling of knowing that everything has changed, and you have to keep going, but you don't know what to do.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“They say that God never closes a door without opening a window.
I hate that saying. Closing a door is an asshole move, and opening a window just means you can look at, but not take part in, whatever is on the other side. Or maybe the window is there so you can throw yourself out of it.
Either way, it's a shitty deal, and why wouldn't you just kick the door back open?”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Borders. Tresholds. Doorways. Windows. Neither inside nor out. Not one thing any longer, but not yet another. The in between.
Order fails, and ghosts come in.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“I want one more moment, one more word, one more touch, and I'm not the only one. Everywhere I look there are hungry ghosts, and I am one of them.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“New starts are rare in this life, and they become rarer the older you get. When you are little and everything is before you, you can become anything, anything at all, but as you get older, you calcify, get stiffer, less able to stretch and bend. Before you even realize it, your personality is a habit. Your mistakes are habits. Everything about you is a habit, and the chances to break them are slimmer and slimmer.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“I feel like a bird, sometimes, I think. My bones are sometimes as hollow as bird bones. I call and call in my own bird call, but I can’t find anyone who will call back.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Poor girl, so tragic, so bad, poor girl, so dreadful, so sad...
But people are always judging, even when they express sympathy.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Our fingers brush together for a brief moment, and I'm suddenly overwhelmed with the need to be touched.
Not fucked. Not kissed. Not titillated. Just...held, perhaps. Embraced. Enfolded.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“You're kind, someone is going to hurt you really bad someday.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Order fails, and ghosts come in.
Now there are hands on my body, the sheets tangling like a snare around us. He stinks of cigarettes and booze, and I am floating, falling, somewhere, between here and there, and I think:
Remember me.
And I think:
Want me.
And I think:
Stay with me.
But no one ever does.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“And suddenly I think: nothing is fine. It’s never fine. It’s always an illusion. Happy smiles, assurances, jokes, laughter—there’s no way to tell if it is real, or a mask. There’s always something terrible hurtling toward you, something that will destroy all that you love and alter your life forever. You may not know it, but it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do. No amount of hammering, or holy water, or screaming will change that.
You can scream no, and stop, and please, you can reach out and try to bend fate to your will with your own two hands, but it has already been decided. In every moment, a thousand accidents wait to happen, already in place and poised to strike, and we don’t even know it”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Caring too much leads to heartbreak. Wanting something too much leads to despair. The Buddhists probably have it right, that the root of all suffering is desire, but I don't know how to stop feeling these things. They are feelings. You have to feel them.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“But I don't care about guys all the time. I want to fall in love with Daniel. But I don't want to get hurt, and that's what love means. It means getting hurt.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Bir şeyleri dışarı atıp kapıyı kilitlediğinde, aslında kendini içeri kilitlemiş oluyorsun.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Magic's Pawn
“Henry, this isn't about us. I mean it is, but they don't define you by the button you wear. They define you by what you do, by what your actions say about you. And coming here, despite your parents, says a lot to them- and me. And they're Americans first. They don't see you as the enemy. They see you as a person.”
― Jamie Ford, quote from Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Second Sex
“Words don't hurt you." Which is one of the hugest criminal lies perpetrated by adults against children in this world. Because words hurt more than any physical pain.”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from UnWholly
“My Albert married his Maisie Brown as he said he would. But I think she never took to me, nor I to her for that matter. Perhaps it was a feeling of mutual jealousy.”
― Michael Morpurgo, quote from War Horse
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.