Kate > Kate's Quotes

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“It is at night... that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull.”
― Brian Aldiss

“Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.”
― Samuel Goldwyn

“hell is full of good wishes and desires.”
― Bernard of Clairvaux

“We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.”
― B. F. Skinner

“Because we find something distasteful is not justification enough for us to deem it criminal.”
― Moby

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
― Joseph Stalin

“I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”
― Oscar Wilde

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love... Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.”
― Daniel Keyes

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
― James Baldwin

“High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up.”
― Stephen King, Carrie

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
― J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
― Georges Simenon

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Maybe if I can just sleep for a hundred years, I'll wake up in a better story.”
― Huntley Fitzpatrick, My Life Next Door

“People enter our lives for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“And then one day you will look for you in the mirror and you’ll no longer be able to identify yourself—you’ll only see everyone else. You’ll know that you did what they wanted you to do. You will have assimilated. And you will hate yourself for it, because it will be too late.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass