Kathryn > Kathryn's Quotes

“Tell me a story, Pew.

What kind of story, child?
A story with a happy ending.
There’s no such thing in all the world.
As a happy ending?
As an ending.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.”
― W.H. Auden

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
― Sharon Olds

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

“She has given me a way out.”
― Alison Bechdel

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Poor health was not just the result of random acts, bad luck, bad behavior or unfortunate genetics. Deliberate public policy decision about housing, education, parks and streets were the key drivers of racial differences in mortality. Crime kept people off the streets and limited their ability to exercise. The lack of grocery stores limited dietary choices. The lack of primary care doctors and specialists in these communities made chronic disease care more difficult. The degradation and loss of hospital services in these communities affected hospital-based outcomes. … The chronic underfunding of critical health services at Cook County Hospital and other safety-net providers contributed to these poor outcomes as well. The deleterious impact of social structures such as urban poverty and racism on health has been called 'structural violence.”
― David A. Ansell, County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital

“They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
― Stephen King

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds”
― E.E. Cummings

“Now, hate,” she started, “ain’t no use in hate, Josie. Ain’t no use in hate,” she repeated. “Whatever you trying to get away from, hate just binds you to it. You find, even when you think you found a way out, God will bring it back to you, slap you right in the face with it. Where you thought it had gone missing. So don’t ever say hate.”
― Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, The Revisioners

“Maybe that was what true love meant: a bitterness that stayed on the tongue when everything else faded.”
― Zen Cho, Black Water Sister

“Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.”
― Alison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength

“Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.”
― Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“We have not always been forced to pass, to go underground, in order to work and live. We have a right to live openly and proudly...when our lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman