The best Book Quotes

How can we prepare for the future if we won't acknowledge the past?

In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.

For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.

Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.

But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.

Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

True peace required the presence of justice, not just the absence of conflict.

"I think," Hoa says slowly, "that if you love someone, you don't get to choose how they love you back."

We can never be gods, after all - but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

There's truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.

It's all right to need help. All of us have things we can't do alone.

Well. Adolescence is all about making mistakes.

But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always a little love left, underneath. Yes. Horrible, isn't it?

Mother always said that if one must do something unpleasant, one should do it wholeheartedly and not waste effort on regret.

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me, and you.

But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them - even if, in truth, their victims couldn't care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and - pop! - out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.

He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and...

he was a beautiful butterfly!

On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon.

That night he had a stomach ache.

It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.

Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods.

Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation. Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

Arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation.

I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man's soul to the corpse hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man's life.

Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear.

An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.

Laughter in battle. That was what Ragnar had taught me, to take joy from the fight.

When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed.

I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.

Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.

God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.

I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.

She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.

I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.

Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.

Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to.

Memories, you see, hurt. The good ones most of all.

I kept hearing that "better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Another falsehood. Trust me, it is not better. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

Love your parents - while we are busy growing up, they are growing old.

A beating hurts for a little while. The shame of cowardice never leaves.

Before we go forward, we have to look back.

Perception is often more important than reality.

Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up. Ray Levine was one of those people.

Hope could be a wonderful thing. But hope could crush you anew every single day. Hope could be the cruelest thing in the world.