Kat > Kat's Quotes

“Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“They smiled wide and lost it for a second, laughed like nothing bad had ever happened to anyone. Laughing could really do that.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of this deprivation is murder. These women murder.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“One of Sade's cruellest lessons is that tyranny is implicit in all privilege. My freedom makes you more unfree, if it does not acknowledge your freedom, also.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“these were paranoid times. These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody. You could have a nice wee conversation with someone here, then go away and think, that was a nice, wee unguarded conversation I just had there – least until you start playing it back in your head later on. At that point you start to worry that you said 'this' or 'that', not because “this' or 'that' were contentious. It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It's shackling you. You've identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can't be one of them?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I was angry," he said, "and I'm still angry, but you can't really be angry with a place unless you love it. You have to love it to wish it to be better, to wish it could be different.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“One thing I want you to understand is that your suffering does not make you special. There’s a voice inside everyone who suffers that says, no one else has it like this, and so much selfish action comes from listening to that voice.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“I have tried to live by making work my life. It has made me step on people - in small and big ways - who just use work as work, and I’ve tried to valorize it, as if I care more about the archives than other people do.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely — within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You were young. You didn't know that your mind could be a boon and a prison both. That someone could take its power, and turn it against you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath