Kati > Kati's Quotes

“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”
― William Faulkner

“and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.”
― Ursula Hegi

“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”
― Alice Munro, Open Secrets

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”
― Lucretia Mott

“He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.”
― Marguerite Duras

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”
― Joseph Conrad, Chance

“Once a man I was leaving told me I could go if I would leave my skin behind. I was so young I didn't even know that I was wonderful..”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.”
― William Faulkner

“Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

You always look so cool," she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart”
― William Butler Yeats

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.”
― William Faulkner

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition

“...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.”
― Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair

“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.”
― Toni Morrison

“Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.”
― Robert Penn Warren

“It was a love of perpetual flight.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“One travels long distances not solely for large gatherings, but for something more intangible. I have always gone out on a limb for love. A dangerous, romantic, disappointing way to live.”
― Jennifer Ball, Higher Math: The Book Moose Minnion Never Wrote

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have;
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“That's great," Katie said. "Actually, it's revolutionary. If you can work and be in love at the same time, you're the first woman I ever knew that could. Maybe you're the missing link, Amanda."

Maybe you ought to get a job for the 'Ladies Home Journal.' They like simplistic shit like that.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“...all the horrors of war are soon forgotten in the pomp and circumstance of show and parade.”
― James Henry Gooding

“He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth