Caty Callaghan-Doherty > Caty's Quotes

“Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“The thing we know is that humanity has a hundred per cent mortality rate. We all die. But the facts don’t matter – we can’t bear to lose the people we love, and it doesn’t quite register about the billions who die, or even about our own coming deaths. We don’t experience our own death the way we experience the deaths of those we love.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“Being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“...it was magic to feel you had things to say and people to say them to, and a gentle fog of contentment filled the bar...”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Never judge anyone by another's opinions. We all have different sides that we show to different people.”
― Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

“Love shouldn't make a beggar of one. I wouldn't want love if I had to beg for it, to barter or qualify it. And I should despise it if anyone ever begged for my love. Love is something that must be given -- it can't be bought with words or pity, or even reason.”
― Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

“Yes, there's one thing I do want. I want to be aware of the minutes and the seconds, and to make each one count.”
― Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

“No one should give up a dream without giving it a chance to come true.”
― Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

“If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Asher said, "Does it really ever go anywhere?"
"Does what?"
"Love. Does it vanish?"
Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself steady whenever Asher braked suddenly. "I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn't it?"
Asher said, "I think that's the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“I hate that we have to live in the middle of history. We make enough mess on our own.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“There's really nothing to prepare a person for having their hand taken in just the right way.”
― Karl Geary, Juno Loves Legs