Katie Fitzgerald > Katie's Quotes

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The Christian life is not simply a waiting game in which we patiently bear misery until we die and hope that when we get there, we will qualify to move across the great divide and experience something better in the next life. Although we cannot fully experience this heavenly joy until the next life, we can experience it by degrees in this life, through the earthly Liturgy.”
― Leila Marie Lawler, The Little Oratory: A Beginner's Guide to Praying in the Home

“Housewives more than any other race deserve well-furnished minds. They have to live in them such a lot of the time.”
― Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe

“No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”
― Eva Ibbotson, A Company of Swans

“It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.”
― Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

“A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.

A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.

A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.”
― J. Patrick Lewis

“Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn't true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul's hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I realized after I got Jesus, I'd marry "that good woman who put me right with the Lord, got me away from the bottle and taught me what life is really all about." Which was to say, some church girl that resembles a pile of loose fat upholstered with pale goopy skin, and whose whole life is chocolate cake and visiting her sister.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I always liked that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wonder if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“It wasn't that funny, but I laughed. There wouldn't be much laughter in the world if people didn't like each other, because there sure as shit aren't that many good jokes.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I know the mall is just a lot of fake plants and fake food and people buying crap for too much money, and at Christmas people pay for their kids to talk to Santa, learning greed the way some kids learn piano. I know all that. I can hear the Muzak, smell the waffle fries. Like everybody else, I walk around stuck inside a cliche, like we're stars of some TV show we plan to watch later, if nothing else is on. But still, there's something hopeful about this place, too, and maybe it takes having a crazy mother to get that. People buy stuff, because they think they are going to need it, because they think their lives are going to keep skipping down the same old path, and I want so much for that to be true for them that it nearly makes me cry. The mall says, Nothing is terrible. The mall says, Life is small and adequate.”
― Heather Hepler, Jars of Glass

“You can tell all of us are morphing into full-blown adults, wingtip adults, because all the time now the Big Question is, What are you going to do? After the summer, about your scholarship, about choosing a college, after graduation, with the rest of your life. When you are thirteen, the question is, Smooth or crunchy? That's it. Later, at the onset of full-blown adulthood, the Big Question changes a little bit - instead of, What are you going to do? it turns into, What do you do? I hear it all the time when my parents have parties, all the men standing around. After they talk sports, they always ask, What do you do? It's just part of the code that they mean "for a living" because no one ever answers it by saying, I go for walks and listen to music full-blast and don't care about my hearing thirty years from now, and I drink milk out of the carton, and I cough when someone lights up a cigarette, and I dig rainy days because they make me sad in a way I like, and I read books until I fall asleep holding them, and I put on sock-shoe, sock-shoe instead of sock-sock, shoe-shoe because I think it's better luck. Never that. People are always in something. I'm in advertising. I'm in real estate. I'm in sales and marketing. ”
― Brad Barkley, Jars of Glass

“Finding A Way

I'd like you for a friend.
I'd like to find the way
of asking you to be my friend.
I don't know what to say.

What would you like to hear?
What is it I can do?
There has to be some word, some look
Connecting me to you.”
― Myra Cohn Livingston

“Teased

Sometimes
when I'm teased
I don't cry,
I go away.
When I come back
my brother and his friends
are doing something else.
I remember.
They forget.”
― Richard J. Margolis

“I Still Have Everything You Gave Me

It is dusty on the edges.
It is slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
I focus on it once a year
when I shake it out in the wind.
I do not ache.
I would not trade.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“No one knows why we hate Hattie. Maybe it's her wool skirts and kneesocks. Maybe it's because she's the last to develop. Maybe it's because she makes A's. Maybe it's because if we hate her, no one will hate us.”
― Lorie Ann Grover, Loose Threads

“They looked for one another when nothing else was happening, the way you pick up a magazine or look in the cupboard for a snack. Not exactly by accident and not exactly on purpose. You could go out in the world and do new things and meet new people, and then you could come home and just sit on the stoop with someone you had never not known, and watch lightning bugs blink on and off.”
― Lynne Rae Perkins, Criss Cross

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”
― Richard Russo

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. ”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“There's a certain class of people who will do you in and then remain completely mystified by the depth of your pain.”
― Sue Grafton, E is for Evidence

“Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.”
― Sue Grafton, A Is for Alibi

“-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'
There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter”
― P. G. Wodehouse

“There will be all these fifty-year-old women wearing hot pants and squeezing themselves into pretzel shapes and then there will be me. Just reaching for my toes like they're China. 'Hello there! You're so far away, I can't get to you! Can you even hear me?”
― E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

“It is better to be alone, she figures, than to be with someone who can't see who you are. It is better to lead than to follow. It is better to speak up than stay silent. It is better to open doors than to shut them on people.

She will not be simple and sweet. She will not be what people tell her to be. That Bunny Rabbit is dead.”
― E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks