Kevin Catalano > Kevin's Quotes

“And the rain was brain colored
and the thunder sounded like something remembering something.”
― Stan Rice

“Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”
― Harry Crews

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off.”
― Stephen King, Storm of the Century

“One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.”
― Norman Maclean, River Runs Through It

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“People say, That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough.”
― Tayari Jones

“If a girl is traveling in the steppe and she sees nothing but a single moving dot in the great distance, the dot sees her. Stag, man, wolf.”
― Atticus Lish

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial

“I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.”
― Frida Kahlo

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your own clothes.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
― William Faulkner

“I couldn't believe it.

Something wasn't right.

I thought, "Batman smokes cigarettes."

I couldn't believe it. "Batman smokes fucking cigarettes."

I walked away and saw that Batman was just this stupid guy dressed up in a rubber suit, just as afraid as I was, and that I lived in a lost place inside my own heart, where even Batman couldn't help me.”
― Scott McClanahan, Hill William

“The demons exist. If they don’t find you, you create your own. Fear is there. It never fades. But know that you never have to be alone. Never doubt yourself, just because everyone else doesn’t understand. There’s an entire kingdom out there. Hold on to that image. Be”
― Michael J. Seidlinger, Falter Kingdom: A Novel

“And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Where she was headed, the cast iron skillet had been seasoned before she was born. Her”
― Kelly J. Ford, Cottonmouths

“Watching her walk away, Emily felt as dirty as if she’d been watching porn. The craving came on like a fever, as if a coal had been stoked within and blurred the edges of reasonable thought. Rather than push it away, she sat on the floor and let the desire consume her. A”
― Kelly J. Ford, Cottonmouths