Cat > Cat's Quotes

“And what I really intended to say in the end remains unsaid.”
― Franz Kafka

“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.”
― Euripides

“I love you, because I have seen your soul.”
― Violet Trefusis

“And if you really want me, I will come to you, always, anywhere.”
― Vita Sackville-West

“it was Carol she loved and would always love...it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent — Live — live fully, live passionately, live disastrously if necessary. Live the gamut of human experiences, build, destroy, build up again! Live, let’s live, you and I — let’s live as none ever lived before, let’s explore and investigate, let’s tread fearlessly where even the most intrepid have faltered and held back!”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of life, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.”
― Violet Trefusis

“This book is yours, my witch. Read it and find your tormented soul, changed and free.”
― Vita Sackville-West, Challenge

“Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.”
― Annie Proux, Brokeback Mountain

“He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded--like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman--here, however, remembering the
Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Remembrance clamoured in him: 'She was wild and free,
Magnificent in giving; she was blind
To gain or loss, and loving, loved but me - but me!”
― Vita Sackville-West

“Quiet, towards their town of kind captivities,
Having slain rebellion, ever turned his head
Over his shoulder, seeking still with his poor eyes
Her motionless figure on the road.”
― Vita Sackville-West, Poems of West & East

“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.”
― Thomas Hardy, Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
In the heat of her hands I thought, this is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“What was joy, anyway. What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact.”
― Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep

“Some parts of her I keep in my memory, others in my heart. This, I keep in my blood. And all night in bed, my blood slowly drags through my veins, bringing that moment to every piece of my body. It is beyond words. This isn't a feeling, it is a state of being.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had seemed as durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour”
― Euripides, Medea

“I confuse instinct for desire—isn’t bite also touch?”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“I left thee in the crowds and in the light,
And if I laughed or sorrowed none could tell.
They could not know our true and deep farewell
Was spoken in the long preceding night.”
― Vita Sackville-West

“Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife