Katie > Katie's Quotes

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
― Margaret Atwood

“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”
― Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“She felt the abyss of disenchantment.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“This soup tastes like windows”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
― Walt Whitman

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
― Walt Whitman

“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
― Walt Whitman

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”
― Walt Whitman

“When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“They wore each other like a pair of socks.

From "Love of my Life”
― T. C. Boyle