Katie > Katie's Quotes

“Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“Still, I’ve always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“There is a comfort, I suppose, to consuming violence contained in ninety-minute segments, muted by commercials for household goods and communicated to us by former television stars with feathered bangs.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“It’s odd, then, that in my twenties, despite my devotion to urbanity, I often found myself wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one. I can’t explain this by way of any rational desire;”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.”
― Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“If you are in a privileged group, and you want to help oppressed people, one of the best things you can do is teach other people in your privileged group. As a person of privilege, you do not have to actually face the oppression, so you have time to teach. Oppressed people do not have the energy to teach everyone about the oppression they have to live through every day.”
― D. Watkins, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America

“My city is gone, my history depleted, ruined, and undocumented. I don’t know this new Baltimore, it’s alien to me. Baltimore is Brooklyn and DC now. No, Baltimore is Chicago or New Orleans or any place where yuppie interests make black neighborhoods shrink like washed sweaters. A place where black history is bulldozed and replaced with Starbucks, Chipotles, and dog parks.”
― D. Watkins, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America

“Cops never fucked with David Simon while he was filming The Wire, and dudes who rock out at that rock club The Crown sing about drugs and addiction weekly, but Moose can’t do the same? Martin Scorsese can, but Moose can’t? Can you not be an artist if you’ve dealt heroin? If you’re a felon? If you’ve owned guns? So now being black and from the ghetto bars you from artistic expression?”
― D. Watkins, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America

“The police officers in Baltimore, as in many places in the country with dense black populations, are out of control and have been out of control. One of the major reasons is that many Baltimore police officers don’t live in Baltimore City; some don’t even live in Maryland. Many don’t know or care about the citizens of the communities they police, which is why they can come in, beat us, and kill us without a sign of grief or empathy.”
― D. Watkins, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“It's important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn't come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high.”
― Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

“My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.”
― Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

“Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people have had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren’t looking. Keep a close watch.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“If you love home—and even if you don’t—there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back. That week, even the things that would irritate you—the alarm waahing from some car at three in the morning; the pigeons who come to clutter and cluck on the windowsill behind your bed when you’re trying to sleep in—seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“The media wants to call them riots, but they’re uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don’t behave and they get all the rights they want.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir

“The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“There’s a Greek legend—no, it’s in something Plato wrote—about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.”
― Nancy Garden, Annie on My Mind

“Grief is an impossible meal, so we cut it up into little pieces, dress it in ritual, and take it like a pill.”
― S.J. Sindu, Marriage of a Thousand Lies

“Every woman’s body is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home.”
― Amy Bloom, White Houses

“I have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen.”
― Amy Bloom, White Houses