Kat Becker > Kat's Quotes

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to
succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“...the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”
― Martha Nussbaum

“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.”
― Paul Harding

“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”
― Shusaku Endo, Silence

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending...
But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.”
― Edward Morgan Forster, A Passage to India

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. (1355b 17)”
― Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I didn't know what exhausted me emotionally until that moment, and I realized that the experience of being a soldier, with unlimited license for excess, excessive violence, excessive sex, was a blueprint for self-destruction. Because then I began to wake up to the idea that manhood, as passed onto me by my father, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor, my army sergeant, that vision of manhood was a blueprint for self-destruction and a lie, and that was a burden that I was no longer able to carry. It was too difficult for me to be that hard. I said, "OK, Ammon, I will try that." He said, "You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you're not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.”
― Utah Phillips

“I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.”
― Paul Harding, Tinkers

“And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.”
― Paul Harding, Tinkers

“You have my whole heart. You always did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road