Cat Hellisen > Cat's Quotes

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“Because even if we're strange and Cursed and Beasts, the people Above are monsters.”
― Leah Bobet, Above

“The girls cannot contain their joy. They must start rehearsing immediately. They teach Saluni a new song that they have composed at the swamps. It is about croaking frogs in their green and brown colours and how the girls caught them and pierced their eyes with sharp sticks and set them free to hop about in wonderful blindness. It is a haunting melody. They tell Saluni that the song is all about the fun they had at the swamps today. The blinded frogs will live peacefully because now they won't be bothered by the bright rays of the sun. They won't have to run from danger, because they won't see it. They will therefore be safe since danger only catches those who run away from it.”
― Zakes Mda, The Whale Caller

“I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism—better dead than dying.”
― Samuel Butler, Erewhon

“The world is not simple. The world is not one place. It's the sum of an impossible number of incomprehensible things, and if you start out on any road in the world and follow it for any distance at all, sooner or later you enter into a strange country.”
― Kate Milford, The Broken Lands

“And this is the world you saved. Did you expect it to be different, suddenly? Did you expect it to be grateful?”
― Kate Milford

“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others