Cats W. Bats, Esq. > Cats W. Bats, Esq.'s Quotes

“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“How joyful to be together, alone
as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river
long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;
and now instead of two stories fumbling
to meet, we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness
of mortals, who know themselves”
― Wendell Berry, Entries

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend

“And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”
― Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”
― Alfred Tennyson, Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson: Idylls of The King, The Lady Clare, Enoch Arden, In Memoriam, Becket, The Foresters: Robin Hood and Maid Marian, Queen Mary ... Lyrical, Suppressed Poems & More

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.”
― Shannon Alder

“Very good, Jason Grace," Notus said. "You are a son of Jupiter, yet you have chosen your own path- as all the greatest demigods have done before you. You cannot control your parentage, but you can choose your legacy.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“When you give another person the power to define you, then you also give them the power to control you.”
― Leslie Vernick, The Emotionally Destructive Relationship: Seeing It, Stopping It, Surviving It

“I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.”
― Oscar Levant

“And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“We are all architects of faith, ever living in these walls of time.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I want to be with you. It's as simple, and as complicated as that.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Or maybe spring is the season of love and fall the season of mad lust. Spring for flirting but fall for the untamed delicious wild thing.”
― Elizabeth Cohen, The Hypothetical Girl: Stories

“Nobody likes a clown at midnight”
― Stephen King

“your hand
touching mine.
this is how
galaxies
collide.”
― Sanober Khan

“The point is there ain't no point.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.”
― Emil Cioran

“In a church of my own we're perfect together
I recognize you in the stained glass”
― Heather Nova, The Sorrowjoy

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights