Book Club Quotes

Start locally and build. Start small and grow. Start in your house, then move to your school, your book club, your gym, your church, your temple, your city. ~ Laurie David

Or maybe when she realized that he was never going to come and rescue her, she did what all strong women do. She found a way to save herself. ~ Adriana Trigiani

I tried to start a gang once.
It turned into a book club.
- MEME ~ Darynda Jones

Book club meets every other month or so. Besides marriage counseling and the very occasional night out with my sister, I'm home twenty-nine nights out of thirty, and still the girls resent me. Not once have they ever complained about Adam's late meetings - which may or may not have been booty calls for amazing porno sex. Me, I go out to my stupid book club, and I'm punished for it. ~ Kristan Higgins

Nobody quits the book club. Once you're in the club, you're in it forever. ~ R.L. Naquin

It's because of libraries that books like mine get recommended to book clubs and avid readers, who in turn pass them onto others looking to be whisked away from the world for a little while ... and perhaps to learn a bit about themselves in the process. ~ Jodi Picoult

People are typically more comfortable talking with others in their own environment; being asked to come to a conference room to help a leadership-heavy team evaluate work flow can evoke understandable anxiety and make them feel like they are on a witness stand. It is much more effective to go to them. ~ Karen Martin

Having the book-club army embrace you is a gift that keeps giving for years. ~ Christina Baker Kline

At your next book club meeting, picture me sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes on your preferences. Imagine the next day you get an email from me trying to sell you a new grill - or a book - or accessories for your Glock. That's the Amazon/Goodreads deal. It's appalling. But everywhere in the press, you'll read about the genius of Amazon.
(Michael Herrmann and the booksellers of Gibson's) ~ G.R. Reader

The first rule of book club - is that nobody wants to talk about book club. ~ Douglas Lewis

If you can be heard then you exist. ~ Fredrik Backman

Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women. ~ Jami Attenberg

To hell with what anyone thinks about your life, but you should know what you think about it. ~ Abby Fabiaschi

I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book. ~ Chris Abani

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind. ~ C. Lynn Murphy

If I grew up with a dysfunctional family, I would eventually start a book club. ~ Martha MacIsaac

The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

So what's this about a book club? You girls sit around, reading dirty books, fanning each other's vaginas? Because if so, count me in! ~ Jay McLean

Emily wondered whether Artie would be so carefree if he knew The Book Club was performing grand theft imagination. ~ S.A. Tawks

Ever since Aristotle described three different kinds of friends - friends of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue - we have known that a set of friends can be a diverse lot. We can have friends we only see at basketball games or book club, friends we see nearly every day at work, and friends who are our confidants. Specialization is fine - we do not expect to like all of our friends in the same way or for the same reasons. At ~ Bella DePaulo

Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love. ~ Janet Goodfriend

There is comfort, even among strangers, when people find something they are equally passionate about. ~ Joyce Rachelle

I embellish the truth of their lives with the lies of my imagination. ~ Charlie Lovett

Anyone who met him today would say, *Soldier. Fighter.* They would want him on their team. As a mother she was willing to engage in pride over fear and to admit the possibility that his sacrifice was hers, too. His sacrifice was something she had been able to give her country. ~ Lea Carpenter

Benji, book club isn't about the book. It's about women getting together to talk about our lives with an assortment of baked goods nearby. And wine. But don't you worry, it's okay if I skip one." "What are you talking ~ Jenny Lee

My hot-as-fuck Mistress makes nachos, watches football, and has a book club. Careful, baby, I'm gonna start thinking you're a real person and not an angel sent from heaven to jack my shit."
She started laughing, through it saying, "I'm sure you'll agree I'm no angel."
He moved his face close to her. "Don't know about that. ~ Kristen Ashley

A few years back, when I finally got smart enough to go to a therapist, she asked me how I had held things together all these years.
It didn't take long to come up with an answer. 'That's easy. I belong to a book club ~ Lorna Landvik

He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is The Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

...I do write books that are female oriented. In my books, the female characters are always searching for something and they often find it, and what they find is themselves and their own strength. I want girls to understand there has been a long history of strong women... Women have always been oppressed but managed to see their own way, and there is a long tradition of females doing what they want to do, and that's what girls can do. They can have selves of their own, a definition of themselves.'" ~Virginia Hamilton in Shireen Dodson's the Mother-Daughter Book Club ~ Shireen Dodson

The 'coons had enjoyed a real party, and my trashcan had been the piñata! They'd obviously indulged in an evening of feasting on our wares and then staggered off the property loaded up with our birdseed as a little take-home gift! ~ Suzanne Kelman

An English major is like being in a book club that costs $40,000 a year, has only annoying people in it, offers no refreshments at the meetings, and where people actually read the books. ~ Aaron Goldfarb

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I've loved her ever since. ~ John Dufresne

Alan shrugged. "I love the CBC, really, but being voted its president - " "Co-president," Sputnik corrected. " - is kind of like being declared King of Nerds." "Co-king," Sputnik asserted. ~ J.M. Richards

This was not even a particularly big offense in the pantheon of book club crimes, where the worst sin one could commit was not to read the book in question
or, even worse, to lie about having read the book when, in fact, you'd simply seen the movie, a lie usually uncovered when you used the actor's name by accident. ("I love the part where Daniel Day-Lewis ... ") ~ Will Schwalbe

I've never done this before. I didn't go to human bars. Mudslides aside, I'm not much of a drinker. Club people are not my people. Now, book-club people - ~ Molly Harper

These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you. Of course we do. Why haven't we been saying that all along? ~ Nina Riggs

Who are we?" Mack said, standing all. "We're the Bromance-Fucking-Book-Club. ~ Lyssa Kay Adams

Not seen you in here before." Dieter stared at Gethin's chest. "Cool harness."
"Thanks."
"Have you been here before?"
"No," Gethin said.
"Why tonight?"
He sounded genuinely curious and Gethin shrugged. "Book club was cancelled."
In Dieter's giggle, Gethin caught a glimpse of the teenager he really was.
"You read then?" Dieter asked.
"I try. Not the long words obviously. ~ Barbara Elsborg

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea. ~ Yann Martel

I have this book club, and we don't read one book; we offer up a few suggestions and create a library over time. ~ Claire Danes

. . . communicate their desires. My book club is discussing a novel this month on this very subject. Fifty Shades of Grey. Would you like to borrow my copy, Matthew?" I take a long drink of water. "No, I'm already familiar with it, thanks." The fact that my dear, sweet mother is familiar with it, however, will definitely be giving me nightmares. ~ Emma Chase

What if in every breakup, the dumper gets to live happily ever after, while the dumpee gets a lifetime membership in the Bitter Book Club? ~ Melissa Kantor

There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology. ~ Amy Hatvany

I soon forgot about my bedraggled appearance. Until, that is, an old man shuffled in and propped himself, hunched and wheezing, over the check-in desk. Karen asked him if he needed assistance.
"No," he grunted sucking on his teeth, "your wet-T-shirt librarian with the punk rock hair is helping me out just fine. ~ Suzanne Kelman

The face that greeted me, however, was far from welcoming, it was a miniature stick insect of a woman with wiry white hair and enormous glasses that emphasized her heavily wrinkled face. She blinked twice and looked me up and down. By the look on her face, she wasn't that impressed with what she saw. "Who is it, Ethel?"
She responded, "It's some homeless woman. She looks like she needs money and a good wash."
And I thought I'd already reached the lowest point of my day. ~ Suzanne Kelman

We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine. ~ M.J. Rose

I do, in fact, have a book club. I meet with a couple of guys once a month of a lunchtime discussion of some interesting text, usually, but not always, philosophical. ~ David Liss

My mother had a book club that would dissolve into opening wine. ~ Tim Federle

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life? ~ Fredrik Backman

Many believers get together to discuss a great book and mistakenly call it Bible study. That is, in fact, a book club with a spiritual theme. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I'm taking fifteen, and we're moving this discussion upstairs."
"You can have here! I will not listen."
"You will listen," Mallory said, "and you'll tell your book club exactly what you heard."
"But is like Twilight in real life!" Berna protested. "Sparkles! ~ Chloe Neill

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me. ~ Abraham Verghese

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community. ~ Bell Hooks

You think I like this?" I say defensively. "Trust me, I don't need this headache in my life." I swallow a mouthful of beer. "Hey. You know Twilight?" He blinks. "Excuse me?" "Twilight. The vampire book." His wary eyes study my face. "What about it?" "Okay, so you know how Bella's blood is extra special? Like how it gives Edward a raging boner every time he's around her?" "Are you fucking with me right now?" I ignore that. "Do you think it happens in real life? Pheromones and all that crap. Is it a bullshit theory some horndog dreamed up so he could justify why he's attracted to his mother or some shit? Or is there actually a biological reason why we're drawn to certain people? Like goddamn Twilight. Edward wants her on a biological level, right?" "Are you seriously dissecting Twilight right now?" God, I am. This is what Allie has reduced me to. A sad, pathetic loser who goes to a bar and forces his friend to participate in a Twilight book club. ~ Elle Kennedy

What really goes on behind the scenes at the Romance Book Club? ~ Michelle Hughes

I feel very discouraged with the state of gay and lesbian publishing because I don't feel like we're really welcome in the mainstream and then you get ghettoized and put on some lesbian book club reading list where you don't want to be either. ~ Ali Liebegott

Anne did think on the question with perfect decision, and said as much in replay as her own feelings could accomplish, or as his seemed able to bear, for he was too much affected to renew the subject - and when he spoke again, it was something totally different. ~ Jane Austen

Lately, even the Waybacklist borrowers seem to be missing. Have they Been seduced by some other book club on the other side of town? Have they all bought Kindles?
I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor! - but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through. My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models< ... > There are newer Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial design, but this one is like Penumbra's postcards: so uncool it's cool again. ~ Robin Sloan

Maybe he was too drunk to hear me when I told him to stop. Maybe I didn't say it loudly enough. Maybe I didn't say it enough times. ~ Amy Hatvany

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction - until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define "literature". The Latin root simply means "letters". Those letters are either delivered - they connect with an audience - or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books - and thus what they count as literature - really tells you more about them than it does about the book. ~ Brent Weeks

It didn't take Celeste long to realize that this was going to be the sort of book club where the book was secondary to the proceedings. She felt a mild disappointment. She'd been looking forward to talking about the book. She'd even, embarrassingly, prepared for book club, like a good little lawyer, marking up a few pages with Post-it notes and writing a few pithy comments in the margins. ~ Liane Moriarty

It takes courage to knowingly read a book that is challenging some of your cherished beliefs. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Look at them. Where are they looking? They're not looking at each other, they're not looking at the art on the wall or the sun in the sky; they're looking at their phones. They hang on to every beep and alert and tweet and status update. I don't want to be that. I'm distracted enough as it is by the actual, tangible, physical world. I've embraced the efficiency of a desktop PC for work and research, and I even use a laptop on my own time, but I draw the line at a cell phone. If I want social media, I'll join a book club. I will not be collared and leashed and tracked like a tagged orca in the ocean. ~ Penny Reid

It occurred to Meg that there were probably a lot of her mother's friends she'd never met. "Naughty Book Club. They've known each other for a few years. ~ Tracy Ewens

Sometimes, you simply must follow your heart," she said. "No reasonable man can blame you for that." A smile. "No reasonable woman can, either. ~ Leonard Pitts Jr.

I barely heard someone behind me at the bar say, "Are they fighting or having a book club?" And a different person answered, "I'm unclear. Looks like foreplay to me." We both ignored them. ~ Mia Sheridan

Relax, Klara, you can finish your one-woman book club as soon as somebody gets home. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

Book-club night stopped abruptly when Caleb died. For almost a year and a half, as if by some type of tacit agreement, they all knew they couldn't be in the same room at the same time. It was as if their collective grief would multiply, rebounding endlessly within any closed space like an image in a house of mirrors, until the pain would overcome them all. ~ Francis Guenette

We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one. ~ Will Schwalbe

During their subsequent meetings, which were soon and often, Lance confessed and anatomized his passion for her. He even gave her its (the passion's, of course) biography. It had been born of a book jacket, the one responsible for the only really nice thing ever said about Eloise Michaud in a metropolitan review - The photo-portrait on the book jacket will move as many books as, say, good writing might. To be honest, however, the picture is worth quite the price of the volume. Miss Michaud is the most scrumptious scrivener ever to set pen to the paper of a book-club contract. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

This is a jury of your peers. They watch the same TV movies. They belong to Oprah's Book Club. You can take any monster, slap a bad dad into his past, and all of a sudden he's just another lost soul, lashing out. And you were the poor lady that got in the way. They'll argue you lacked compassion. You were the one who took things too far. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Finding pleasure at home-whether in a family dinner or a book club or a backyard barbecue-can give us the strength to go out into the world and do incredible things. ~ Reese Witherspoon

The girl I'd been just an hour ago was gone; she'd been obliterated. I had no idea who I was, now. ~ Amy Hatvany

By the way, I'm not usually attracted to danger," I said. "Up until now I've led a pretty boring life."

"Boredom is good!" Dr. Rasman looked pleased. "Boredom is why God invented books. Are you still in your book club? ~ Julie Schumacher

The first sentence of a book is a promise. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

She's a poetry book.
You must read every letter,
and digest every word.
Every part of her paints
a part of a bigger picture.
You can't love her,
if you do not intend on
reading every page
and learning how to
comprehend every piece of her. ~ Pierre Alex Jeanty

Book marketing should be a planned process, an art if you will. ~ Heather Hart

I wanted to create a book that was unafraid of black bodies, yet super interested in thinking about the relationship of love to body and sexuality without relying on tired understandings of "gay" "bi" or "straight." ~ Kiese Laymon

Seek not the power to create things under your control. Seek rather to manifest that which is beyond your control. ~ Ross Hostetter

For instance, with "Ragtime" I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That's the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Braodviw Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was president. One thing led to another and that's the way that book began: through desperation to those few images ... - 92nd Street YMHA Interview ~ E.L. Doctorow

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products. ~ Alexander Osterwalder

Manchester United? That's not an option. I am staying at Bayern Munich. Period. I had a great time under Van Gaal at Bayern, he has been very important for my career but I am very happy at my current club. ~ Arjen Robben

I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book. ~ Janet Evanovich

MY HUSBAND, STEPHEN DANDO-COLLINS
QUOTED THIS RECENTLY IN WANGARATTA AT A BOOK SIGNING WHEN ASKED ADVICE FOR SUCCESS.........
1. Marry Louise.
2. Do what she tells you.
3. Keep her happy! ~ Louise Dando-Collins

I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace. ~ Kim Gordon

Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we're actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons. ~ John Green

And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work. ~ Alan Jacobs

I was not being mean. Mean was her mother giving her the name Bernice Woodward.

Ryals, R.K.. Cursed (The Thorne Trilogy Book 1) (Kindle Locations 66-67). . Kindle Edition. ~ R.K. Ryals

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it. ~ Edith Wharton

When life ends it's like a book losing pages or a song skipping. It's abrupt and it doesn't make sense. ~ Benjamin Appleby-Dean

In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault. ~ C.S. Lewis

To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

The world of book is the stream of souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We are all children of one God and the only thing that separates us is our ego ~ Kapil Kumar Bhaskar

Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real? ~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

There's so much stuff being written! Every year, how many books come out? I can't keep up, and I read a lot. It's amazing. ~ Victoria Chang