Catherine > Catherine's Quotes

“Lily had no real intimacy with nature but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”
― Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking?

“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it's actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm whcih elevates me to heaven, for nothing contributes so much to tranqualize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Talking to him is rather like talking to a school play.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the bed we wake up in in the morning and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I feel like the word shatter.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Tell the world what scares you the most” says Brandy.
She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says “Save the world with some advice from the future”
Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.
On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.”
Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss in the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift and card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle.
Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random useless facts that are all we have left from our education”
A kiss and the card’s on it’s way toward Lake Washington.
From Seth:
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
A kiss and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard.
Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:
I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.
Beandy is waiting to rake the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net.
While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net Brandy reads another card from Seth.
We are all self-composting”
I write another card from the future and Brandy reads it:
When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves”
An updraft lifts up my worst fears from the suicide net and lifts them away.
Seth writes and Brandy reads.
You have to keep recycling yourself”.
I write and Brandy reads.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.”
I write and Brandy reads.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go