“In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“He could not tell her that he was angry because she did not love him. Even he could not utter such foolishness. Certainly, he did not love her. He did not love anyone except perhaps Isaac and a very few of his other children. Yet he wanted Anyanwu to be like his many other women and treat him like a god in human form, competing for his attention no matter how repugnant his latest body nor even whether he might be looking for a new body. They knew he took women almost as readily as he took men. Especially, he took women who had already given him what he wanted of them--usually several children. They served him and never thought they might be his next victims. Someone else. Not them.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“You are a good man,” she had observed contentedly. “And it has been too long since I had this.” He was surprised”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“Could she give Doro what he wanted—what she herself had wanted for so long—children who would not die?”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“Thus, when her enemies came to kill her, she knew more about surviving than they did about killing. And”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“to be aware of a place where blackness was not a mark of slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed
“...he'd know about the role of mirror neurons in the brain, special cells in the premotor cortex that fire right before a person reaches for a rock, steps forward, turns away, begins to smile.Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning form our own mishaps isn't as safe as learning from someone else's, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social whirl possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another's joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self.”
― Diane Ackerman, quote from The Zookeeper's Wife
“Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly american poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the american is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame -- the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“The floor had become a sea and the bed a ship, seen from a great distance. I could hear their voices calling me from far away. It lasted a minute or less. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe I did not. It was an image that came to haunt me, and I have often wondered what would have happened if I had done as I was told and left the silver shoes alone. Would everything then have been alright?”
― Sally Gardner, quote from I, Coriander
“The clouds was light but queerly yellow on their edges as they moved across the ageless constellations.”
― Peter Carey, quote from True History of the Kelly Gang
“A good teacher teaches what he has been taught. A wise one teaches what he has learned”
― quote from Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived
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.