Kat > Kat's Quotes

“Deliver my soul from the sword,
my darling from the power of the dog.”
― Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman.”
― James M. Cain, Double Indemnity

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I think,” Juna says after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realise that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth--to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"
"No!"
"What is his purpose, then?"
"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, and every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“I'm no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I’d known, maybe I’d have kept tighter hold of them, and not let unseen tides pull us apart.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“Once upon a time, man had a love affair with fire.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song

“It is a contradiction this creek- a hundred thousand years old but renewed with each rainfall.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song

“...and his bones were a cage of ice.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers

“Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers