Kate Tempest > Quotes

“How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside,
Each killing the last?”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“Better to have been a dickhead and seen it,
than be a cunt all your life and not know it.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“And the days are all dust
and the only thing worse
than losing the trust
of a lover is finding the rust
in their kiss.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“We die so others can be born
We age so others can be young
The point of life is live,
Love if you can
Then pass it on.

- We Die”
― Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos

“The world is a terrible place for sensitive people but the closer we come to losing our minds, the harder we’ll work to keep them.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by payment plans”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“Taking things for granted is a terrible disease. We should all be checking ourselves regularly for signs of it.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“But on dark days he likes to walk
Beside the heartsick sea.
And as the waves begin to howl
He drops down to his knees,
And cries for all he's lost
And for all he used to be.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“True love takes its toll
On souls
Who are not used to feeling whole”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“Empathy is remembering that everybody has a story. Multiple stories. And remembering to make space to hear someone else’s story before immediately telling your own.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“She flicks her words like lit matches. They drop delicately, burning.”
― Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses

“there’s always been heroes,
there’s always been villains,
the stakes may have changed
but really there’s no difference.

there’s always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition.
jealousy, love,
trespass and contrition,

we’re the same beings that began,
still living,
in all of our fury and foulness and friction.
Everyday odysseys.
Dreams vs decisions.
The stories are there if you listen.”
― Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients: A Poem

“It's on us, the people at the bottom to fix things for ourselves even though it's us who suffer the decisions of the people at the top the most”
― Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses

“Everybody’s looking for their tiny piece of meaning. Some fleeting, perfect thing that might make them more alive.”
― Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses

“Foul smell of the things that we do to escape
There is no glamour in this. No rock and roll.
This is just endings. This is just grief.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“If you allow approval to define you, you will have no choice but to allow disapproval to define you when it comes.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“Millions of characters, each with their own epic narratives singing it’s hard to be an angel until you’ve been a demon.”
― Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients: A Poem

“Or, more simply, creativity is any act of love. Any act of making. It is usually applied to art-making, but it can also be applied to anything you do that requires your focus, skill and ingenuity. It takes creativity to dress well, for example. To parent. To paint a windowsill. To give someone you love your full attention.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“But we are still mythical. We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful. We are still godly; that’s what makes us so monstrous. But it feels like we’ve forgotten we’re much more than the sum of all the things that belong to us.”
― Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients: A Poem

“We are empathic beings who feel for each other. Our very success as a species is rooted in our ability to be aware of each other's needs, to notice each other's pain and to experience deeply felt physiological and emotional empathy.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“The work that I do on myself may not be evident in my daily exchanges, but little by little, if I continue, I hope that my actions will reflect my changing mindset, and next time, I promise myself, I'll do things differently. Getting on top of my shortcomings is not immediate; it's endless.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“What happened to us? We go parties now, and we've nothing to say to each other 'til we're fucked. And even then. We spend hours talking about parties from before, things that happened to us once, we spend life retelling life and it's pointless and boring.”
― Kate Tempest, Wasted

“How to follow orders when you're bordering on nausea and you're bored and insecure and dwarfed by fear.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“Winter laid her solemn hands across the city and stroked all the colours out of the sky”
― Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses

“Sun of himself. All things are his moons.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“If you've been an arsehole today, acknowledge it.
Try not to be one tomorrow.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“If we give as much as we expect to take from a novel, a poem, an image or an album (or a conversation, or a relationship), it has a greater chance of becoming profound. As readers, we feel this happen when something speaks directly to our experience and we feel the words burning themselves into us...You may forget the exact words, but you carry a relationship with the text through your life. You may think this was entirely because of the quality of the text, but it was also about the quality of your reading.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“For words to have meaning, they have to be read.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection

“Look again and you will see the Gods rise in the most human and unassuming of eyes.”
― Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients: A Poem

“When I am numb, how can I make myself connected? I can't. But I can try to create an environment that is welcoming for connection if it should turn up.”
― Kae Tempest, On Connection