Kate Inglis > Quotes

“Grief is not an illness, a diagnosis, or a constant state. Grief is the bruise after a blow. Blackening is normal. Swelling is normal. Then a rotten sort of putrid. Then it sinks beneath the skin, failing to mark you anymore, failing to excuse you, returning you to the masses before you’re ready. You’ll miss the black and blue because as soon as it fades, you go from “honoring” to—as your onlookers might say—“dwelling,” that damnable word.”
― Kate Inglis, Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief

“Grief is most intolerable when there’s a gap between what you need and what you’re getting.”
― Kate Inglis, Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief

“Forgive people for not knowing what to say, for filling the vacuum with every wrong thing. The quicker you realize most humans are artless thugs when faced with someone else's grief, the quicker you'll get over it when you meet one.”
― Kate Inglis, Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief

“I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the loss of bodily presence and the gain of ghost messages. It's misplaced outrage and well-placed courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye. Stories hinge there, swinging this way and that.”
― Kate Inglis, Flight of the Griffons

“There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.”
― Kate Inglis

“Beautiful publishers say beautiful things and then We're sorry, but no... and then more beautiful things. It's a shit sandwich with branston pickle and melted gouda.

I read it out loud to the kids. I stick it to the fridge with the others. Some writers do that because it turns their crank to have a Wall of Publishers Who Passed And Will Someday Regret It. I don't. Each one is, really and truly, a gift. We look at them and the boys and I talk about rejection, all kinds of it. Creative, karmic, romantic. Nothing works out until something does.”
― Kate Inglis

“The windshield wipers are pushed up so they won't freeze to the glass and a robin just landed on the tip of one, staring beady-eyed at what we both hope is the great giving-up. The field freezes and unfreezes. It's snowing but it's a spineless snow, sugar on top of defrosted mud. There's life under there. The robin took off and the wiper blade twanged like a plucked string.

Everything's coming alive.”
― Kate Inglis

“When you've got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I'd write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the last sentence trailing off like eeeeeejjjjjjjjjjjjj . . . Then I'd finally crawl to bed. Mornings were rough, but I got used to it. It was invigorating to write a couple thousand words while the rest of the world was asleep. More invigorating than rest.”
― Kate Inglis

“Humility is in not telling other people what to do but in supporting others as they determine what they should do for themselves.”
― Kate Inglis, Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief

“You might worry your heart is full of holes and that a heart full of holes can't function properly. Now think of all the things that do exactly what they are meant to do thanks to their holes, large or microscopic: sponges, souffles, the foam inside life jackets. Your holes are buoyant. So are mine. Your holes make you lighter than you look.”
― Kate Inglis, Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief

“You will never be yourself again. Not in the way you think of “yourself” as a concept. You will always long for what you have lost. But you will also be countless other things you don’t know about yet.”
― Kate Inglis, Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief