The best Book Quotes

I won the bet but I lost the only thing that has ever made me happy.

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing.

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.

What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy p-nis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady.

Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a man to make money.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

I did not mind the cold so much when he was there.

You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home.

It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily.

"Well," Lockwood said, "if you judge success by the number of enemies you make, that was a highly successful evening."

Dave: "You're not our leader."
Lucy: "No, but I know what I'm doing, which is a nice alternative."

Lockwood: "Never touch a mummified body part if you don't know where it's been. That's my motto."
George: "Holds true with unmummified ones too. That's the motto I live by."

According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, mainly because, no matter how cool, stylish, composed, unflappable, manly, or defiant you are, at the end of the day you're also dead. Which is a little too permanent for my liking.

It was Nathaniel's boundless capacity for stating the obvious that made him so charmingly human.

"Really?"
"No. I'm being ironic. Or is it sarcastic? I can never remember."
"Irony's cleverer, so you're probably being sarcastic."

It was a time of beginnings and a time of endings.

Stop worrying about the past. The past is for ghosts. We've all done things that we regret. It's what's ahead of us that counts.

"I warn you," the boy went on. "I am a magician of great power. I control many terrifying entities. This being you see before you" - here I rolled my shoulders back and puffed my chest up menacingly - "is but the meanest and least impressive of my slaves." (Here I slumped my shoulders and stuck my stomach out.)

Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you.

I wasn't pretty, but as my mother once said, prettiness wasn't my profession.

He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens.

In my eyes, refusing cake is an immoral act.

One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.

I don't know how old the man was... but he was definitely closer to coffin than crib.

Despite his crimped shirts and flowing mane (or perhaps because of them) I had seen no evidence as yet that Nathaniel even knew what a girl was. If he'd ever met one, chances are they'd both have run screaming in opposite directions.

Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.

A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

By now, in his mid to late teens, he might just about have passed for a man. When seen from behind. At a distance. On a very dark night.

And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.

To my astonishment I saw him standing at a table with Kitty Jones. It was the Kitty Jones bit that was astonishing. Not the table. Though it was very nicely polished.

"Is it just me," Kipps said, "or does that boy need punching?"
"It's not just you."

"Have you a name?"
"A name?" I cried. "I have MANY names! I am Bartimaeus! I am Sakhr al-Jinni! I am N'gorso the Mighty and the Serpent of Silver Plumes!"
I paused dramatically. The young man looked blank. "Nope never heard of you. Now if you'll just-"

"Looks?" the skull said. "Who cares about that? It's superficial. Outward appearance doesn't interest me at all. Why do you think I hang around with you?" It chuckled. "Insult aside, that's just one way in which I'm superior to every one of you, except for Cubbins."

"It wasn't the body," he said. "I've seen worse things in our fridge."

Hey, we've all got problems, chum. I'm overly talkative. You look like a field of buttercups in a suit.

Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardly bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.

"Much has happened since last we met, Bartimaeus," he went on. "Do you remember how we parted?"
"No." I did.
"You set light to me, old friend. Struck a match and left me burning in a copse."
The crow shifted uneasily beneath the cleaver."That's a gesture of endearment in some cultures. Some hug, some kiss, some set each other on fire in small patches of woodland."

"Plan F, we follow Plan F, right now."
"Is that the one where we run away?"
"Not at all. It's the one where we beat a dignified emergency retreat."

Jabor finally appeared at the top of the stairs, sparks of flame radiating from his body and igniting the fabric of the house around him. He caught sight of the boy, reached out his hand and stepped forward.
And banged his head nicely on the low-slung attic door.