“No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“The Cypress Hills massacre,...one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West...came...along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system of monopoly trading and the American system of competition, whiskey, bullets, exploitation, and extermination.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing--animals as a rule, men if necessary.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones…Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s fall”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Wolf Willow
“If they shoot at you, shoot back. If it’s one of my people, don’t worry about blasting one by accident. Jayne would kill them anyway for endangering you.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Born of Defiance
“Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.” Still,”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, quote from The Sympathizer
“You don't go into battle because you're sure of victory. You go into battle because it's the right thing to do.”
― C.J. Redwine, quote from The Shadow Queen
“Perhaps he can avoid being stretched by falling in a horizontal position, legs and head at the same altitude. Yet when the giant tries it, he finds a new discomfort; the stretching sensation is replaced by an equal feeling of compression. He feels as if his head is being pressed toward his feet. To understand why this is so, let’s temporarily imagine that the Earth is flat. Here is what it would look like. The vertical lines, together with the arrows, indicate the direction of the gravitational force—not surprisingly, straight down. But more than that, the strength of the gravitational pull is entirely uniform. The 2,000-Mile Man would have no trouble in this environment, whether he fell vertically or horizontally—not until he hit the ground anyway. But the Earth is not flat. Both the strength and the direction of gravity vary. Instead of pulling in a single direction, gravity pulls directly toward the center of the planet, like this: This creates a new problem for the giant if he falls horizontally. The force on his head and feet will not be the same because gravity, as it pulls toward the center of the Earth, will push his head toward his feet, leading to the strange sensation of being compressed. Let’s return”
― Leonard Susskind, quote from The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
“There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
― J.M. Barrie, quote from Peter Pan (Illustrated with Interactive Elements)
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.