Kate > Kate's Quotes

“the way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person's soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.”
― Keith Miller

“It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘That’s because it is.’ ‘So why live at all?’ ‘Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“So much talking makes it hard to listen.”
― Karen Rivers

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.”
― Will Ferguson, Happiness

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― Banksy

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“What are the important things in blogging, you might ask? Well, to me, the things that matter most are good writing; high-quality images; truly original content; connecting with your readers in a meaningful way; having a sense of purpose; and your blog being a resource, a place that helps other people.”
― Gala Darling

“The most sacred ritual a songwriter must honour is this daily offering to creativity. It can be five hours in a dedicated space or five minutes in a window seat on a plane, but it must be done. Write your heart and do it every day, first thing in the morning if you can. Everything else is icing on the proverbial cake.”
― Charlie Worsham

“A lot of people try to counteract the ‘I am not good enough’ with ‘I am good enough.’ In other words, they take the opposite and they try to invest it. That still keeps the world at the level of polarities. The art is to go behind the polarities. So the act is to go not to the world of: ‘I am good’ to counteract ‘I am bad,’ Or ‘I am lovable’ as opposed to ‘I am unlovable.’ But go behind it to ‘I am.’ I am. I am. And ‘I am’ includes the fact that I do crappy things, and I do beautiful things. And I am.”
― Ram Dass

“it has been my repeated observation that to put a name to a sexual attraction to fat is to invite being called a fetishist. The idea of having a “fetish,” after all, seems suspicious to many people, abnormal, probably sick. Given the depth and intensity of our training to abhor and abjure fat, it also seems suspicious and abnormal and probably sick if one fails to hate it, let alone likes it in some way. This, to my way of thinking, is proof of our real fat fetish. We have created a fetish object of wrongness, of ugliness, of undesirability out of something common and generally benign. This is fetish as sympathetic magic: the thing becomes what we believe it to be, and it taints by association.”
― Hanne Blank, Fat

“Fat is an everyday thing, a bodily organ and a biochemical substance without which we would not be able to survive. It is as mundane and ubiquitous and as much a part of our nature as blood and bone. But you’d never know it by the way we talk about it, the obsession we have with getting rid of it, our conviction that it is inimical not just to a good life, but to life itself.”
― Hanne Blank, Fat

“The advice I would give to an able-bodied person having sex with a disabled person for the first time is to, first, breathe. Accept that you both might be anxious at times, but just take a deep breath.
Ask questions. I like to first test with just a touch, and see what the reaction is. I have found that most disabled people, out of necessity, have learned to communicate what their needs are very well, but they still may be apprehensive asking for certain things pertaining to pleasure. Ask, “How does this feel? What can I do to help?”. Be respectful when asking questions, communication is everything.”
― Handi, The Handi Book of Love, Lust & Disability

“Please do smack me if this is out of line, but you are the most exquisite woman I have ever seen in my life, and I would like to procure for you the most lavish drink in this establishment if you will let me.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“It’s so aggravating the way people assume that just because I like having sex with some people, it means I like having sex with all people.”
― Zoe Whittall, The Spectacular: A Novel

“I am not bitter because that would be a waste of my time, and wasting time is one of the only sins worth worrying about.”
― Ellen Wittlinger, Hard Love

“Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. To the contrary, constant dieting may make weight loss more difficult, as our metabolisms fight back, searching for the stasis of a familiar, fatter body.57 A major study following contestants from the television show The Biggest Loser showed that despite their dramatic weight loss on camera, most contestants were unable to maintain their smaller size, despite hours of working out each day. The study’s results were staggering: after their extreme televised dieting, every contestant’s body burned fewer calories at rest than it did at the beginning of the competition—and one contestant was shown to burn eight hundred fewer calories each day than expected for a peer of the same gender and size.58 Those results aren’t limited to reality TV contestants. As one Slate writer put it, addressing dieters, “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chances of keeping it off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I don’t think I can really advertise my point of view, since I wear it on my sleeve that I’ve got problems. But you know what? We all do. There’s not a formula for happiness but I can’t tell you how much better it is to be yourself.”
― Jackie Ess, Darryl

“In the twentieth century, power announced itself. In the twenty-first, the surest way to spot real power is by its understatement.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

“I don’t even know if I like you. I just know that whatever love I have for you is the only reason I’m even talking to you right now.”
― Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play

“There was general astonishment, therefore, when Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen showed in 1998 that a rubber hand, under the right circumstances, could be mistaken for one’s own. If a subject’s real hand is hidden under a table while the rubber hand is visible before him, and both are stroked in synchrony, then the subject has the convincing illusion, even though he knows better, that the rubber hand is his—and that the sensation of being stroked is located in this inanimate though lifelike object. As I found when I looked through the “eyes” of a robot, knowledge in such a situation does nothing to dispel the illusion. The brain does its best to correlate all the senses, but the visual input here trumps the tactile.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

“The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Ratings are no sign of worth. Never judge yourself on them. To be liked by everyone you would have to be the blandest person ever. William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer of all time. He has a mediocre 3.7 average on Goodreads.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“the use of those two words together—queer community—may be more aspirational than actual. A community is not a utopia, but it should be a space where outside prejudices are unwelcome, and where solidarity is a default. Unfortunately, that is not yet a reality.”
― Justin Ling, Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System That Failed Toronto's Queer Community

“Creativity—that state when ideas seem to organize themselves into a swift, tightly woven flow, with a feeling of gorgeous clarity and meaning emerging—seems to me physiologically distinctive, and I think that if we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring. At such times, when I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves in spontaneous succession and to clothe themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me, certainly the best part of me.”
― Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

“it’s funny: sometimes i forget that people are judging me. most of the time i’m so fucking high on my own ideas and impulses that i forget someone might disagree with a single one of them.

this is, i think, the only way to ever move forward.

this is, i think, the only way to make art.

not good art. not bad art….

ANY art.”
― Amanda Palmer

“I sank into the kiss, not overtaking his mouth like I normally do, but allowing a kiss like a normal boy and girl, not domme and slave. Sometimes, especially as a prelude to a kinky scene, a little vanilla is needed to spice things up.”
― Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tasting Her: Oral Sex Stories