Cat > Cat's Quotes

“Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“She used to grip me so tightly that the only way I could put her down was to pry her loose, one digit at a time. For two years, I had bruises from her fingers and toes all over my body.”
― Karen Joy Fowler

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“He wondered vaguely how many others like here there might be in the younger generation, people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.”
― Michael Shaara

“We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to dear departed comrades. Victory celebrations for most of us, a hallowed death for a few. But the war goes on. And men die. The price gets ever higher. Some officers can pay no longer. We are prepared to lose some of us, but never all of us. But that is the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself totally. And yet, if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“Lee stopped, looked north. I twas working almost like a plan. It was possible to see Intention in it...he gave no further directions...it had never really been in his hands at all. And yet his was the responsibility.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“Longstreet took a deep breath. In the winter the fever had come to Richmond. In a week they were dead. All within a week, all three. He saw the sweet faces: moment of enormous pain. The thing had pushed him out of his mind, insane, but no one knew it. He had not thought God would do a thing like that...she kept standing in the door: the boy is dead. And he could not even help her, could say nothing, could not move, could not even take her into his arms. Nothing to give. One strength he did not have. Oh God: my boy is dead.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“Longstreet stayed up talking, as long as there was company, as long as there was a fire. Because when the fire was gone and the dark had truly come there was no way he could avoid the dead faces of his children.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“Everybody knows all the movements. General So and So should have done such and such. God knows we all try. We none of us lose battles on purpose. But now on this field what can we do that's undone?”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“In the dark of the trees he could smell splintered wood and see white upturned faces like wide white dirty flowers.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“Saw the face of Robert Lee. Incredible eyes. An honest man, a simple man. Out of date. They all ride to glory, all the plumed knights.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“And yet suddenly, terribly, he wanted it again, the way it used to be, arms linked together, all drunk and singing beautifully into the night, with visions of death from the afternoon and dreams of death in the coming dawn, the night filled with a monstrous and temporary glittering joy, fat moments, thick seconds dropping like warm rain, jewel after jewel.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“There ought to be more than just that metallic end, and then silence, then the worms, and sometimes he believed, but just this moment he did not believe at all...there was nothing beyond the sound of the guns...not even silence, just an end.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“The earth was actually shuddering. It was as if you were a baby and your mother was shuddering with cold.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“He suspended thinking; his mind was a bloody vacancy, like a room in which there has been a butchering.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels