The best Book Quotes (Page 10)

We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.

One cannot know it in advance. The heart decides this. If my heart talked to me, I would not care what nation that girl belongs to. The Great Spirit created all men equal. Those who match would find each other sooner or later.

The dead are dead, and talking won't bring them back to life.

"It's no use fretting for what you can't get," croaked the raven. "Does being angry make any difference? Be sensible! What can you do about it?"

Kasperl and Seppel soon discover that even the best-laid plans can be foiled, especially when Hotzenplotz enlists the help of his wicked magician friend Petrosilius Zackleman, a gluttonous villain with a weakness for fried potatoes.

The Robber Hotzenplotz works hard at his job, waking early to hide in the woods and waylay new victims.

Robber Hotzenplotz held poor grandma at gunpoint with his pepper pistol and stole her coffee mill.

There's a kind of magic that must be learned with toil and difficulty, line by line, spell by spell, the magic of the Book of Necromancy - and then there's another kind that springs from the depths of the heart, from caring for someone and loving him. It's hard to understand, I know, but you had better trust that magic, Krabat.

No one likes boys! Even girls who like boys can't stand boys!

It's the problem with fairy tales. From far away, they seem so perfect. But up close, they're just as complicated as real life.

Dear girl, it will be a very long road if you spend more time looking backwards than forward.

To find a happy ending with someone else, first you have to find it alone.

In the forest of primeval
A school for Good and Evil
Twin towers like two heads
One for the pure
And one for the wicked
Try to escape you'll always fail,
The only way out is
Through a fairytale.

It doesn't matter what we are, it matters what we do.

She had always found villains more exciting than heroes. They had ambition, passion. They made the stories happen. Villains didn't fear death. No, they wrapped themselves in death like suits of armor! As she inhaled the school's graveyard smell, Agatha felt her blood rush. For like all villains, death didn't scare her. It made her feel alive.

Beauty can only fight the truth for so long...

"You're not evil, Sophie," Agatha whispered, touching her decayed cheek. "You're human."
Sophie smiled weakly. "Only if I have you."

Sophie: "For the Create-A-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning her-self in a tub."
Agatha: "I thought it was a better ending."

Agatha wondered what these girls' souls would wish for. Depth, perhaps.

Everytime you do a Good Deed with true intention, your soul grows purer.

"My behavior last night was poor."
"Poor?" Agatha coughed. "You pushed me through a window!"

If there was one word Agatha dreaded more than "ball", it was "dancing".

Our towers aren't fair and lovely they're valor and honor that's what good is.

"Agatha, what do you see when you look in the mirror?"
"I don't look in mirrors."
"Why is that?"
"Because horses and hogs don't sit around ogling their reflections!"

"First time I told my dad I liked a girl, he slathered me in honey and sealed me in a bear den for a night. Haven't liked one since."
"First time I told my mother I fancied someone, she baked me in an oven for an hour," Mona agreed, green skin paling. "I never think about boys now."
"First time I liked a boy, my dad killed him." The group stopped and stared at Arachne. "Maybe Sophie just had bad parents," she said.

"You gave me a dead frog for my birthday!"
"To remind you we all die and end up rotting underground eaten by maggots so we should enjoy our birthdays while we have them. I found it thoughtful."

"Now there are five rules that separate Good from Evil," the gnome said, and wrote them in air with his smoking staff.
"1. The Evil attack. The Good defend.
2. The Evil punish. The Good forgive.
3. The Evil hurt. The Good help.
4. The Evil take. The Good give.
5. The Evil hate. The Good love."

Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves.

In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.

What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth?

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us - what happens with the rest?

There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death. Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they'd have called it something much better.

Now that I've forgiven myself, the reminders of him only make me smile.

There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you.

Reading is a hobby, but for some of us, it's an escape from the difficulties we face. To all of you who escape into books, I want to thank you for escaping into this one.

We're all just a bunch of sad people doing what we have to do to make it until tomorrow.

Happiness isn't some permanent thing we're all trying to achieve in life, it's merely a thing that shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just substantial enough to keep us going.