Kate Walbert > Quotes

“I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?

Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.”
― Kate Walbert, The Gardens of Kyoto

“I don’t know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That’s just the way it is.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“In the background, classical music plays from a paint-splattered radio, the New York station with the ancient announcer more frequently heard in doctors’ waiting rooms and other places where signs prohibit the use of cell phones – the last bastions of Beethoven or Chopin or, on racier days, Shostakovich.”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“Eleanor had bargained for their wedding present, the dragon-spouted teapot worth thousands and the cups to match, gold-leafed, scaly.”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“In another landscape, a line of spruce in the distance would appear an inkblot, a punctuation to the endless grey sentence of the morning.”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender – coupled with the perversions of age and the randomness of everything?”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“Do you think we are truly ever old?” she says. “I mean, inside ourselves, old? Ready to be old?”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“Someone once told me a memory is just another draft of a story.”
― Kate Walbert

“No, I say. In no moral universe would this not be a crime, I say.
I was a child, I tell him.
Shame on you, I say. Shame on you, I say. Shame on you.
And he laughs and reaches out for me.
“You are cute as pie when you’re angry,” he says.
“Come here,” he says.
“How old are you again?” he says.
“Close your eyes,” he says.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“The point is,” Sid Morris says. “This. Now. Paint on your brush, wind at your back, my crappy studio. This is the only certainty. Here: your sensations; your body existing for its moment in time. Everything else is crap.”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“Iago says, I am not what I am, and for this he is called deceitful, a villain. Odd, isn't it? I have always found him to be the most truthful of Shakespeare's creations. We are none of us who we are.”
― Kate Walbert, The Gardens of Kyoto

“From here there is never not a day without Master’s shadow across my life—a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going, the place I once imagined I would be.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites: A Novel

“So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into the past, never speeding into the future.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“I should have smashed those spectacles to glass so fine he would never not remember how I ruined his vision - decisive, quick, imperative - and wrecked that world of his own making, its heroes, its scholars, it founding members, generals, politicians, row after row after row after row of men and not real and not true for me, for me, not how I was, or what I saw and thought. Not anything. I could have; I should have; I did not.

But I was fifteen. I could no more have formed those words, those thoughts, than flown to the moon.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“-they were all so clearly portraits of the kind of girl who should be mourned, who should be missed given her do-goodness, her smile, her kindness toward others, and not portraits of any actual girl I knew.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites

“Beauty! Sid Morris said, addressing the dirty windows that looked out to the alley where, on certain Thursdays, the smell up from the Chinese restaurant across the street reached a point you could almost taste. Beauty! he said.”
― Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral

“Thank you for listening, he wrote.
Dear Beautiful, he wrote.
I know I can trust you, he wrote.
I think of you all day, he wrote.
I wonder how you taste, he wrote.
Secret-keeper, he wrote.”
― Kate Walbert, His Favorites