Explore Book Quotes

“You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”

“All had intellectual fathers, domestic mothers. All three were raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning. All three married men who supported their intellectual ambitions. All three lived through the wrenching deaths of loved ones and terrifying, fratricidal warfare—the Hundred Years War in Christine’s case, the American Civil War in Stanton’s, and World War I for Woolf. All three identified with women yet imagined becoming male. In their work and in their lives, all three writers addressed an enduring puzzle: Are differences between the sexes innate or learned? Using stories about the past to challenge history, they talked back to books.”

“I learned early that class is universally admired. Almost any fault, sin or crime is considered more leniently if there’s a touch of class involved.”

“So Cinders read her little book, The Postman drank champagne Then wobbled off On his round again (and again and again – Oops!)”

″ ‘The people without passion are the ones who always say no’, he’d said moments before, and I’d turned, stunned, to listen.”

“Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.”

“When I got there it was all still and Sunday-ike, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’ s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.”

“Then one Saturday morning, two weeks after he moved out of Rachel’s place, Toby woke up and realized he was alone. His new apartment seemed like a set in a depressing play, bare and filled so sparsely with objects…simply to fill space.”

“It’s funny, when you’re a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you’re on the fast train to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me.”

“It is only dogs that never bite their masters.”